Yuma Regional Medical Center, the small Arizona city’s only hospital, is strained after spending $20 million taking care of migrants who came across the border in only six months.
The hospital only has 406 beds.
Dr. Robert Transchel, the hospital’s president and CEO, detailed the problems on Fox & Friends Weekend. The hospital has not received any help from the state or the federal government. He’s contacted DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who has not done anything for him:
“It’s been a long journey,” he said. “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.”—“We just don’t have a payer source. Everybody is sympathetic, and everybody lends a listening ear, but nobody has a solution,” he said.”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,” he added.
Trenschel also said it’s unfair to the residents. Some of them had their care delayed because the hospital had too many migrants to take care of:
“It’s unfair to residents of our community, too, because we’re providing free care to these individuals,” Trenschel said. “The residents of our community don’t get free care.”He also told Fox News his facility’s maternity unit has reached capacity since the largest number of migrant patients requiring care are pregnant. The next closest hospital — 62 miles away — recently stopped providing labor and delivery services.”We would have to delay some of the planned inductions for our residents because of that,” Trenschel said. “Our residents have had to suffer through that.”
It’s obvious Trenschel doesn’t want the hospital to stop taking care of anyone, legal or illegal.
Trenschel noted that the migrants “take at least three times the number of human resources to resolve their cases and get them a safe discharge as a regular patient in our hospital” since many of them have “serious illnesses that require extensive care.”
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