Don't You DARE Interrupt Our Collapse

"...in early January the system’s cash position went negative"

Following up on my last two posts, here’s a quite specific example of Blue Zone insolvency that speaks very clearly about the political crisis of the moment and the insane things that Blue Zone leaders are protecting.

In much of the United States, indigent healthcare is often provided by county governments. A homeless person in a big city who gets hit by a car and has serious trauma may go to a closer trauma center first, but he’s going to end up in the county hospital soon after the other hospital stabilizes him. Though there are different models, the “safety net hospitals” are often owned, run, and staffed by counties, and they live on the county budget, through state and federal funding. In big urban counties, these are incredibly complex and expensive systems, with teams of sophisticated finance and legal professionals who spend their days hunting for money in the thickets of state and federal regulations. Here’s how the big county hospital in the middle of Los Angeles County funds medical care for its enormous patient population every year:

The budget for the entire State of Wyoming is well under $6 billion a year; the annual budget for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services alone is $6.2 billion.

The wheels are usually almost falling off. They provide expensive, complicated care to people who can’t pay for it. The loss of one of these giant healthcare systems would be indescribably catastrophic, dumping an untenable population of indigent patients on systems that can’t possibly take care of them all without also going broke. They’re a societal backstop.

In Minneapolis, which is in Hennepin County, the societal backstop is a festering disaster. Sample headlines:

Yesterday, the journalist Liz Collin posted an all-staff email message to Hennepin Healthcare employees that warns about a newly dire financial crisis: “For months, cash on hand has hovered around zero, and in early January the system’s cash position went negative…We are now fully in crisis mode and must act decisively…To continue operating, we must identify at least $50 million in savings during the first quarter of 2026, and based on current trends, tens of millions more by year-end….The future of our hospital is at risk in this moment.”

They need to find $50 million in savings in the first quarter to survive, or the big public hospital in Minneapolis goes broke and dies. They need to cut tens of millions of dollars in spending by OH HEY RIGHT NOW.

Hennepin Healthcare is about as transparent as a chunk of granite. The board agendas for the independent public entity that until recently ran the system before a county takeover don’t contain or link to the staff reports that the board discussed. You get nothing but the topics that were covered. I can’t find board minutes online, but I welcome others to try. The financial reports offer numbers, but not a detailed discussion of the realities behind the numbers. Some…trends are…happening, they explain. Various challenges are arising. But in a discussion of the recent county takeover of the system, a county commissioner says this:

“Hennepin Healthcare is facing a $50 million deficit, largely driven by rising uncompensated care.”

Rising uncompensated care. For some undiscussed reason, the number of people receiving healthcare in the public system but not paying for any of it or being eligible for state and federal healthcare coverage is getting a lot bigger in a hurry, mumble mumble mumble.

Also, in a county with a growing scandal over Somali daycare fraud, Somali healthcare fraud, Somali housing fraud, and Somali food aid fraud…

…Hennepin Healthcare employs a team of “Cultural Navigators” to help their unique patient population:

The executive who oversees that team, along with a bunch of other DEI initiatives, is the Chief Equity officer, who makes a base salary — see pg. 8 here — of $357,000 a year. Here, watch her define the healthcare system’s most important goal, and notice that it isn’t “healing sick people,” which apparently is less important: “Nneka Sederstrom, the health system’s chief equity officer, said budget challenges put the hospital’s core mission of reducing health disparities at risk. The county declared racism as a public health crisis in 2020.” The healthcare system that treats racism as a medical problem now regards itself as a provider of total lifestyle support, not merely medicine, and provides benefits like this (see pg. 24): “Pre-packed bags of food available to patients at clinic visits.”

Same report, pg. 14:

What do hospitals do? Here, look for yourself:

They celebrate cultural heritage and bring a DEI lens to patient care, and “in early January the system’s cash position went negative.” Get woke, go explosively broke. A massive cultural apparatus runs inside a system that was created to help indigent people who are seriously hurt or sick.

In a broken political culture, noticing all of this will be coded as right-wing. But for crying out loud, the preservation of safety net healthcare for the indigent could just as easily be discussed in a left-coded vernacular, if 21st century progressives remembered the language they spoke in the 20th century. Woke bullshit is eating all the things that liberals used to think they cared about. The uncomfortable truth is that ICE, making the rounds in Minneapolis, is reducing the likelihood of the insolvency and ruin of a public hospital that serves the poor. Mean Orange Hitler is…possibly fixing bankrupt Blue Zone systems, if they’ll get out of the way.

If you live in Hennepin County, how do you avoid noticing that?