Watch the June 14 Regents Meeting of the Health Services Committee

A meeting of the Regents' Health Services
Committee in the style of Picasso, by the
DALL-E artificial intelligence program.

The Regents' Health Services Committee met at UCLA on June 14 (Wednesday). Much of the meeting was behind closed doors. At the open session, no one signed up for public comments, which is unusual. The open component was largely devoted to presentations by EVP Carrie Byington who is leaving UC. This meeting was her last Regents session. She spoke about the strategic plan for UC Health with concerns about revenue and "margin" (profit) pressures, noting that government insurance programs provide less revenue than private.

As we noted in an earlier post, the strategic plan for UC Health references Medicare Advantage programs as potential revenue sources. (We have concerns about Medicare Advantage, basically an ongoing privatizing of the federal Medicare program which has taken close to half of the Medicare market. The Biden administration has imposed rules regarding misleading advertising for such programs. Our concern is whether UC will eventually pressure retirees to take the Medicare Advantage option.) 

Also discussed were concerns about the developing med program at Riverside and Merced. The usual COVID presentation was made including information about so-called Long COVID.

As we also noted earlier, the closed portion of the meeting referred to UCLA possibly acquiring another hospital. There was no revelation of what hospital this was at the open session.

We preserve recordings of Regents meetings indefinitely since the Regents have no official policy on length of retention. You can see the open part of this meeting at:

https://archive.org/details/regents-health-services-committee-6-14-2023.