$20 Million In Funding Approved To Keep Seton Medical Center In Daly City Open
REDWOOD CITY (CBS SF) -- San Mateo County will contribute $20 million to help a potential buyer of Seton Medical Center in Daly City to purchase and operate the hospital, which has been threatened with closure.
The county's Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to approve the funding to keep Seton open amid the novel coronavirus outbreak.
The funding would allocate $5 million annually over the next four years to keep the hospital open and avoid creating a health care desert. Verity Health Systems, the hospital's owner, filed for bankruptcy in 2018 and had been planning to shutter Seton as soon as this week.
The hospital is the largest employer in the city and serves about 27,000 people each year, many of whom are elderly or low-income. The closure would have forced Daly City residents to travel further for urgent medical care and made it harder to treat homeless residents as well as current and future coronavirus patients.
"This is a huge win for the future of patient care at Seton. Now we need Verity to close the deal with the two bidders in play," Supervisor David Canepa said in a statement. "This has been a stressful bankruptcy process, causing fear in our community that a health care crisis will ensue if the hospital were to close and that hundreds of individuals would be forced to find other work. Hopefully, the board's action yesterday will help to quell that fear."
KPC Health and AHMC Healthcare are currently bidding to purchase Seton and Seton Coastside in Moss Beach.
"If we do nothing today, there's a high probability that this hospital will close. That's the bottom line," Canepa said. "You can try to sugarcoat it however you want, you can try to justify it in your mind ... but what's at stake here is the closure of this hospital."
The closure would force the roughly 27,000 people who use Seton Medical Center each year to travel further for urgent medical care, which could ultimately lead to overcrowding at nearby hospitals. The group of legislators also noted that the closure would make it harder to treat homeless residents and current and future cases of novel coronavirus.
The county will give the funding to the entity that buys the medical center from Verity Health, with conditions requiring that the facility remain fully functional and the new owner to submit operational reports to the county each year. Canepa also requested that half of the funding come from the Health Plan of San Mateo.
To date, San Mateo County public health officials have confirmed nine cases of coronavirus among the county's residents.
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