Monterey County’s high-priced hospitals take center stage in a state hearing tomorrow.

Sara Rubin here, grateful that I am currently enjoying good health, something I know can change any time. There are many reasons to be grateful, and money ideally shouldn’t even be on the list. But especially in Monterey County, where the cost of medical care is high, it certainly ranks up there—I get to spend my money on things other than medical bills. 

I’m sure you have heard stories from local people about medical bills they can’t pay. Maybe a friend or neighbor has asked you to give to a GoFundMe campaign; multiple local nonprofits help support costs associated with medical treatment. The heartbreaking stories are all too common, but have finally found a formal venue to be heard. 

Since the newly created Office of Health Care Affordability (OHCA) began holding meetings last year, local people from Monterey County have been traveling three hours to Sacramento to share their stories of staggering bills, debt and frustration with the board members. Tomorrow, Aug. 28, the OHCA board is coming to Seaside—and I expect tons of local people to show up. 

The Weekly’s health beat reporter, Pam Marino, has been covering these stories since early in OHCA’s existence. Along the way, she and I have been mining pages of data, trying to understand exactly how local hospital costs compare. 

As we’ve been reporting, we have met many others mining the same extensive but unwieldy data set, trying to make sense of it. Those people include union reps, who increasingly find their members’ concerns relate to health insurance premiums; they include academics, some of whom have taken a particular interest in our health care market. 

At tomorrow’s meeting, the OHCA board will hear from a series of expert presenters, including Dr. Christopher Whaley, who earned his PhD in health economics at UC Berkeley and now is an associate professor at Brown University. He’ll be back in California tomorrow to present on agenda item 5D, “Case Study: Monterey County Hospitals and State Options to Address High Costs.”

I spoke to Whaley for a preview. “Our analysis shows that hospitals in the Monterey [County] market are both higher-priced than the rest of hospitals in the state of California, as well as their neighboring peers,” he says. “These higher prices are not linked to higher quality.”

That’s what the data shows. Understanding why is a little more complicated, but Whaley—who learned about Monterey County while he was in graduate school at Berkeley, and developed a particular interest in our area—has a theory. “It’s a market where there’s just not a lot of competition,” he says. “It gives the existing providers quite a bit of pricing power.”

The next question for the OHCA board will be what to do about it—and that’s item 5E on tomorrow’s agenda. 

You can attend the meeting in person or virtually. Marino will be there all day, and you can follow along live, or read her report later at montereycountynow.com. And if you have ideas for how to get our arms around the giant volume of data, please reach out. 

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