Sutter Health Statement Regarding the Lawsuit Filed by the California Attorney General:
Updated statement: May 11, 2018
Unfortunately, the California Attorney General’s lawsuit gets the facts wrong and mischaracterizes how Sutter Health serves patients and communities as a not-for-profit organization in the competitive Northern California healthcare environment. Our integrated network of high-quality doctors and care centers aims to provide better, more efficient care—and has proven to help lower costs. We will stay true to our mission of delivering excellent healthcare with compassion, especially for the poor and vulnerable, and we will defend against what the lawsuit claims and seeks, which would disrupt healthcare delivery across our communities and harm patient choice.
Here are some important facts to know:
- Publicly available data from the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development show that, on average, total charges for an inpatient stay in a Sutter hospital are lower than what other Northern California hospitals charge.
- Sutter Health has held average overall rate increases to insurance companies to less than 3 percent annually since 2012, despite our expenses for labor, facilities and technology increasing by an average of 6 percent each year. Given these single-digit increases, we don’t know why some insurance companies have increased their rates to consumers by as much as 20 percent in a single year.
- Healthy competition and choice exists across Northern California. There are 17 major hospital systems and 146 hospitals in Northern California, including Kaiser Permanente, Dignity, Adventist, Tenet, UC and more. Health insurance companies can elect to include or exclude parts of the Sutter Health system from their networks, and health plans have been doing so for many years.
- For additional data related to the attorney general’s claims
- For more information about our integrated network
