charity care

The Wyoming Medical Center is entering its seventh week of dealing with COVID-19.

The report to the Natrona County Commission is a requirement of the non-profit Wyoming Medical Center's lease of the Natrona County-owned hospital assets.

A five-member board of trustees -- called the Memorial Hospital of Natrona County -- oversees the WMC's lease of the county's property.

The Wyoming Medical Center has increased the value of the county hospital assets from a base line of $62.9 million in 1995 to $288.7 million in 2017.

In recent years, the hospital has revised the ability for people to apply for charity care, and much of that has been helped by the Affordable Care Act.

Hospital officials are seeing people who don't have enough insurance for a catastrophic event, and people who don't have insurance because of unemployment.

The jobs lost were in departments including finance, materials management, sterile processing, radiology and staff services. The administration has reduced its workforce about 15 percent in recent months.

The state’s failure to implement Medicaid expansion has aggravated a sharp rise in the uncompensated care written off by the Wyoming Medical Center, hospital officials said recently.

The Wyoming Medical Center writes off two times as much uncompensated care -- bad debt and charity care -- of its gross revenues on average than hospitals nationwide. "It truly is a puzzle, why Wyoming, Casper, Wyoming, seems to be twice the national average," said Serena Cobb, chairwoman of the board of trustees that oversees the WMC's lease of Natrona County's hospital assets... Read M

The Wyoming Medical Center had written off $38.1 million in uncompensated care at the end of the first eight months of its fiscal year, the hospital's chief financial officer said last week. That amounted to 12.5 percent of the hospital's total gross revenues from July 1 through February, Yvonne Wigington said at the monthly meeting of the Memorial Hospital of Natrona County Board of Trustees... R