Humboldt Pediatrics closes its doors
Doctor: ‘We are paying as dearly as our patients are for insurance’
Humboldt Pediatrics closed its doors in McKinleyville last week, ending a brief stint as one of the area’s very few private medical practices.
Dr. Sarah Poyen started the practice last year after her last employer, Eureka Pediatrics, closed in 2017 due to what she calls “insurmountable financial obstacles.”
Now Poyen’s own practice has met a similar fate. She told the Times-Standard on Tuesday that high costs, low staffing and what she called a failing business model for private practices all became too much to handle.
“I had dipped into my savings to cover expenses in July,” said Poyen. “To start this practice, I invested over six figures. I did not recuperate that.”
Poyen described the enormous obstacles facing private practices in the United States, and especially California. Collecting bills from patients became an inefficient chore, she said, and certain vaccines cost far more to obtain than they brought back in payments.
She cited high insurance costs forcing her and other doctors to pinch pennies — a paradox, she said, in a profession that most enter to make sure people stay healthy.
When one of Humboldt Pediatrics’ medical practitioners left on medical leave, it was the tipping point for the practice.
“I was just determined to make it work,” Poyen said. “It was almost worth the experiment, just to prove I couldn’t do it.”
By the end, Poyen said she was serving around 1,800 patients, even as she offered care exclusively to commercially and privately insured residents.
She lamented the strain that the loss of her practice will place on Open Door Community Health Centers, which in past years has opened a number of community clinics in place of shuttered private practices.
Poyen herself is weighing whether to move to the state of Washington, one of a number of states experimenting with a “direct-care” model that cuts private insurance out of the mix.
Dr. Stephanie Dittmer, the president of the Humboldt Del Norte Medical Society, also worked at a private practice — Humboldt Medical Group, which is similarly now closed. Dittmer now operates as a family practice doctor at an Open Door clinic in Fortuna
After a long day of work on Tuesday, Dittmer said the traditional model of reimbursement s through-insurance is no longer viable for the medical trade.
“If you look at the history of the private practice model in California, the direct decline of private practices has been a linear slope downward for almost a decade now,” Dittmer said.
The problem is worse in Humboldt County, where a smaller population with less-healthy residents signals red flags to insurance companies looking to save money.
“With our county’s health stats, how sick we are and the number of people who are here, you can’t really group the same risks,” Dittmer said. “It makes it even more challenging for a physician in the area.”
What’s the path forward? One look at the ongoing presidential debates might prove that there are different ideas in play. Poyen acknowledged health care as a political issue might be polarizing, but offered her take.
“I think there’s no doubt that a single-payer system is the only solution,” Poyen said. “The money isn’t coming to the providers; we are paying as dearly as our patients are for insurance.”