Yuma Medical Center President and CEO Dr. Robert Transchel said Sunday on FNC’s “Fox & Friends Weekend” that his facility had spent $20 million on uncompensated care for migrant patients in the last six months.
Transchel said, “For us, it has been a long journey. We’ve been at this for well over a year now. We tracked our uncompensated care for a period of over six months, and we calculated that we’ve provided over $20 million in uncompensated care to the migrants crossing the border.”
He continued, “We just don’t have a payer source. Everybody is sympathetic, and everybody lends a listening ear, but nobody has a solution. It has been going on for over a year. We’ve provided $20 million in care to the migrants that are crossing the border, and we just don’t have a payer source for those individuals. It’s not a sustainable model to have these continued rising expenses without a revenue source to offset that.”
Transchel added, “We are going to keep functioning. Hospitals operate on a very thin margin. They operate on a 2 to 3% margin every year, and we are no different on that. So we’re fine today, and we’ll be fine tomorrow. The problem is, if this continues, it’s going to build up, and it’s going to continue to be a problem.”
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