Faced with nearly 200 layoffs across the county’s safety-net health care system, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors is looking for a few spare million dollars to try to stem the bleeding.
The Alameda Health System, which operates Highland Hospital and Eastmont Wellness in Oakland, Alameda and San Leandro Hospitals, and other health care centers across the county, has projected that H.R.1, the “Big Beautiful Bill” that a Republican-controlled Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed last year, will cost it hundreds of millions of dollars in the next three years. To compensate it announced a plan to eliminate 188 staff positions, most of them currently filled.
At a public meeting Wednesday evening, current and former patients and their relatives said some of the behavioral health programs facing the deepest cuts had saved countless lives…