Ige OKs $22.5M for Maui Health System
Gov. David Ige signed 64 bills last week before leaving for Colorado for the Western Governors’ Association annual meeting — including $22.5 million for Maui Health System, a Kaiser Permanente company that runs three Maui County hospitals.
The subsidy for the fiscal year running from July 1 to June 30, 2020, is down from the $28 million for the current fiscal year, the measure said. The amount also is less than the $36.8 million the quasipublic Hawaii Health Systems Corp. was receiving before the transition to Maui Health System.
The Kaiser company runs Maui Memorial Medical Center, Kula Hospital and Lana‘i Community Hospital. The three facilities average 8,529 inpatient admissions, 63,647 emergency room visits and 124 long-term care and skilled nursing patients each year, the bill said.
As part of its operational transfer agreement two years ago, Maui Health System receives partial operating subsidies from the state to ease the hospitals’ transition from being government-managed to privately managed.
In 2019, Maui Health System will continue on its path toward self-sufficiency, focusing on resolving union negotiations and identifying appropriate staffing levels by managing productivity, the bill said. In addition, the Maui Health System intends to improve revenues by decreasing the outmigration of services from Maui and recruiting physicians specializing in areas including neurosurgery, trauma, oncology surgery, cardiology, nephrology, urology and primary care.