Long known for having some of the world’s finest hospitals, Los Angeles County is home to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center near Beverly Hills, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Westwood, and UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, to name a few. These facilities operate on the cutting edge of medical technology and attract many of the best doctors from around the globe. Deservedly so, this level of care is expensive and not always available to patients without the level of insurance coverage that might easily place them in such an environment.
From a different perspective, California has one of the lowest ratios of beds per 1,000 citizens in the United States at 1.8, according to Becker’s Hospital Review. The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim area, with a slightly better ratio of approximately 2.2, includes densely populated neighborhoods with far fewer hospital beds available than the local average indicates. In addition, these neighborhoods are home to segments of the population with lower incomes, modest levels of education and, importantly, less access to commercial insurance plans offering access to the region’s elite hospitals. Due to the high proportion of government-pay patients, as well as the cost of retrofitting buildings for earthquake safety, these communities have seen several of their hospitals close or continue to operate under tight financial conditions that begin to impact care delivery.
MPT knows that world-class hospital care is being delivered by talented physicians at facilities of all sizes, locations and demographic profiles. The vast and diverse population of these areas of Los Angeles County—the heart of the city’s lower- and middle-income workforce and home to millions of public servants—needs and deserves more access to high-quality healthcare within its own neighborhood. For this reason, MPT has invested billions of dollars in 12 hospitals in Los Angeles County to allow hospital operators such as Prospect Medical Holdings, Prime Healthcare and Pipeline Health, each known for its ability to profitably operate hospitals serving dense, lower-income and often under-insured populations, to reinvest millions of dollars directly into truly world-class care delivery.
