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Action needed:
Call your state senators and assembly members and urge them to adopt a proposal through this year’s state budget process that will refocus 2030 hospital seismic requirements on post-event emergency services. The proposal will also provide an additional seven years for hospitals to comply as they begin to recover from the financial toll of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Additional details on the proposal are in this one-page outline.
To assist with messaging, CHA has prepared key messages and an issue brief. Our letter to legislators from CHA and hospital constituency groups may also be helpful when talking to lawmakers about your hospital and its needs.
Timing:
Call as soon as possible. This proposal could be acted on as early as next week (week of June 28).
Find contact information for both your assembly member and senator on the state Legislature’s site.
Background:
California hospitals’ extraordinary efforts during the pandemic helped keep thousands of families whole, but those efforts came with a tremendous financial price tag. Even with federal financial relief, hospitals in the Golden State still endured a net loss of more than $8 billion last year. Those losses are only expected to grow — potentially an additional $2.2 billion in 2021 — with no additional federal relief in sight.
The pandemic made clear that hospitals need flexibility to deploy innovative approaches and adapt to rapidly changing circumstances to care for patients in a disaster. Therefore, the future of hospital disaster response must be focused on ensuring people’s health care needs are met, not on complying with arbitrary regulations that gird the infrastructure of the past — whether that disaster is an earthquake, disease outbreak, or severe, widespread wildfires. Lawmakers must take a fresh look at a 1990s state law that will further drain billions of dollars from hospitals and, if not modified, is likely to result in hospital closures across the state.
Contact your state senators and assembly members and urge them to vote YES on trailer bill legislation that would modernize the 2030 seismic standard by refocusing the requirement on post-event emergency medical services and allowing hospitals until 2037 — an additional seven years — to comply.