Yuma Hospital CEO: Providing Care to Migrants Is ‘Unsustainable’ for Us, We Can’t Collect Because ‘We Don’t Know Where They Go’

On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Yuma Regional Medical Center President and CEO Dr. Robert Trenschel stated that the hospital’s business model is “unsustainable” due to the uncompensated costs of medical care for migrants and stated that it’s extremely difficult for them to get compensated for this care because with many migrants, “we don’t know where they’re going to end up. We don’t know where they go. We don’t know if the name’s correct.”

Trenschel stated, “There is no payer source for those individuals. We’ve contacted our state government…we’ve contacted the federal government. And there is — everybody’s sympathetic and they lend a listening ear. But nobody is offering a payer source for these individuals. It’s an unsustainable business model to have your expenses increased by an external entity, consistently and increasingly, without any concomitant revenue source. So, this is an unsustainable business model.”

He added, “This year is not looking very good from a financial perspective and really, that’s — a lot of that is due to these uncompensated costs that we have.”

Trenschel further said that it’s harder to collect medical bills from migrants because, “A lot of the migrants, we don’t know where they’re going to end up. We don’t know where they go. We don’t know if the name’s correct. We just don’t know any of these things.”

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