$2.6M in CARES Act funds to help Humboldt County health centers stay afloat during COVID-19

Jared Huffman: ‘This thing is really hitting the health care system hard’

April 15, 2020

Last week, the national Health Resources and Services Administration awarded $1.3 billion of Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act funds to 1,387 health centers across the country.

Of that, local health centers received about $2.6 million — $1,464,000 to Open Door Community Health Centers, $576,815 to the Karuk Tribe and $619,175 to Redwoods Rural Health Center — that North Coast Congressman Jared Huffman said will help them manage the surge of demand, the risks and the loss of revenue that are merging to exacerbate this crisis.

“Economically this thing is really hitting the health care system hard,” Huffman told the Times-Standard on Wednesday. “Patients who might have private plans oftentimes are deferring that care, so there’s a drop-off in the most highly reimbursable care for hospitals and clinics, and then there’s the addition of all this stuff that might not be reimbursable.”

Hospitals have reported sharp declines in patients seeking care since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is impacting hospital revenues.

To help alleviate some of that, Congress temporarily increased Medicare reimbursement rates, allowed hospitals to take advances on Medicare payments to help manage cash flow, and significantly relaxed rules for telephonic and video health care delivery, Huffman said.

Telehealth wasn’t reimbursable in some cases, but now it is and Huffman said, “My hope is that we never go back.”

“All of that should have always been reimbursable,” he said.

Last week, Tory Starr, CEO of Open Door, said the clinics have pivoted to doing over 90% telehealth visits and that medical providers are doing “almost the same volume of visits as prior to the shelter in place.”

“The major barrier was reimbursement,” Starr said. “The barriers on reimbursement got lifted, so it’s been great.”

Starr wrote in an email Wednesday that the funds from the CARES Act “will be used to pay for our direct operational expenses.”

“Salary and benefits account for more than 75% of our total expenses,” Starr wrote. “The $1.4 million will help cover about 25% of our monthly operational expenses of approximately $5.2 million.”

Open Door’s revenues have been particularly impacted by “the significant restrictions on dental services,” Starr wrote.

“We are still providing emergency dental services but not preventative care,” he wrote.

Redwoods Rural Health Center and the Karuk Tribe were unavailable for comment by publication time.

Huffman didn’t say whether there was more aid on the way for health centers, but said the CARES Act included $150 billion for hospitals and implied more might be on the way.

“These are just triage measures we’ve put in place to recognize the crunch that health care workers are facing,” Huffman said.

Supply chains also need to be addressed, particularly in terms of health care providers’ access to personal protective equipment, he said.

“In many cases they are fending for themselves in this helter-skelter marketplace for protective equipment, paying 10, 20 times more than they usually do,” Huffman said.

There’s limited domestic production of things like gloves, masks and gowns, and since the whole world is simultaneously dealing with the COVID-19 crisis, Huffman said it’s not as easy to source the supplies from Asia.

What the country really needs is a national strategy with an organized way of producing and distributing supplies to areas that need them, which could happen if the president properly used the Defense Production Act, Huffman said.

“Even this far into the crisis, we still don’t have that,” Huffman said.


By:  Sonia Waraich
Source: Eureka Times-Standard