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Hospital commissioner candidates spar over ER care, staffing and looming funding shortfalls
Summary
At the forum, hospital commissioner candidates identified funding pressure, emergency department performance, workforce recruitment and electronic record interoperability as the district’s top health‑system issues and offered competing assessments of current operations and solutions.
Candidates for Island Hospital commissioner told the Chamber forum that the hospital’s two most pressing problems are funding shortfalls tied to public payer rates and operational challenges in the emergency department, particularly triage, wait times and staffing.
Retired surgeon Joe Mulcahy, a candidate for Hospital Commission position 5, said the hospital has limited control over reimbursement from Medicare, Medicaid and military insurance and that low Medicaid reimbursement has been a chronic problem: “We rely on public payers… and we have very little control over what they pay us,” Mulcahy said. He added that the ER needs better triage and…
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