Santa Clara County’s recent expansion of its public hospital system has averted closures that threatened to curtail emergency care access but also boosted its staffing of highly paid doctors and health care workers and vaulted its payroll costs to among the highest in California.
That was among the highlights of a Bay Area News Group analysis of employee compensation data that counties report each year to California’s State Controller.
While Los Angeles County had the most employees and the highest total cost for their pay and benefits, as you might expect from California’s most populous county, Santa Clara County came in second, ahead of four other counties with larger populations: Riverside, San Diego, San Bernardino and Orange. They each have more than 2 million residents; Santa Clara has 1.9 million.
Nearly half of Santa Clara County’s employees last year worked in the county’s expansive and growing health care system of hospitals and clinics, which County Executive James Williams said accounts for his county’s hefty payroll. That commitment to growing the county-owned health care system continues as the county plans to add Regional Medical Center to the other three hospitals and 14 clinics the county currently runs.
O’Connor Hospital is one of three hospitals operated by Santa Clara County Health System located in San Jose photographed in 2015. (Patrick Tehan/Bay Area News Group)
“Something big happened in 2019,” Williams said. “We added two hospitals and thousands of employees.”
Mark Hinkle, president of the Silicon Valley Taxpayers Association, is skeptical of the expansion of the county’s public health system, citing the cost to taxpayers and a lack of sufficient competition among health care providers in the region. Hinkle sees the high cost of the county’s employees as inextricably tied to the high cost of living.
“In order to attract doctors, nurses and other health care professionals, we’ve got to jack up their compensation so that they can actually live in the area” Hinkle said. “The cost of housing has a domino effect.”
Statewide, California counties spent a combined $45 billion last year on the nearly 400,000 public employees who work at county agencies around the state. Those county employees include sheriff’s deputies, jail staff, prosecutors, social workers, local elected officials, and nurses and doctors in public health systems, and among many others.
The cost of all those employees has grown by 80% since 2010 when county governments reported about 375,000 employees, whose pay and benefits then cost $25 billion. The state’s cost per employee has grown 71%, from about $67,000 to $114,000 average costs per employee in that time, far outpacing inflation in California, which has grown by 46% in those 13 years.
While not the only county in the state that owns and runs hospitals, Santa Clara County has the second-largest public health system after Los Angeles County, which has 5 hospitals in its system and five times as many residents. While its hospitals serve as safety-net facilities for people without insurance, typical for county hospitals, they also regularly treat those with coverage.
Alameda, Contra Costa and San Mateo counties …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
