Dive Brief:
- Mercy Health System, based in Chesterfield, MO, will lay off 300 workers across four states this month. The hospital blames the layoffs on legislative refusal to expand Medicaid in most of the states Mercy serves.
- Mercy, a non-profit which employees 40,000 employees in seven states, is the sixth largest Catholic health system in the country.
- Eliminated positions will not include those involved directly in patient care.
Dive Insight:
State-level refusal to expand Medicaid is yet another financial pressure imposed on hospitals' bottom line, and its impact is not insignificant. What is striking about the Mercy layoffs is the size of the system. Recalcitrant legislatures are often blamed for closures of small and rural hospitals — at the recent National Rural Health Association annual meeting in Las Vegas, CEO Alan Morgan ascribed closures to that political phenomenon, and Healthcare Dive recently profiled a CAH in Tennessee that backs him up — but with hospitals in Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, Mercy is not a small, rural hospital.