By the Nicholas C. Petris Center | Published in April 2001 by the Petris Center | Link to Full Report
In October 2000, The Petris Center on Health Care Markets and Consumer Welfare, a research organization at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, took on the job of creating a taxonomical list of all general acute care hospitals in California that closed between 1995 and 2000. Thus, we have put together the only effort that we know of to collect and synthesize standardized information about the California hospitals that closed in the second half of the 1990s. For the first time, we can now document and describe the 23 general acute care (GAC) hospitals that closed, 11 of which took place at for-profit facilities. The vast majority took place in urban areas, and they were most often in southern California. More than half of the closed hospitals had fewer than 100 licensed beds. Ten of the closed hospitals had changed ownership within three years prior to their closure. All the closed hospitals claimed, and demonstrated, financial distress prior to closing.