New Health Plan Will Look for Obamacare Boost

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MemorialCare Health System last week launched Seaside Health Plan, part of the hospital operator’s efforts to adapt to national health care reform.

MemorialCare, the Fountain Valley not-for-profit owner of Long Beach Memorial, Miller Children’s Hospital Long Beach and Community Hospital Long Beach, is focusing on the L.A. market first.

Seaside has contracts with Health Net, L.A. Care Health Plan, Anthem Blue Cross, Blue Shield of California and Care 1st Health Plan. It also plans eventually to participate in the Covered California health insurance exchange, where residents who don’t have coverage from an employer will be able to sign up for coverage.

Seaside was created from the assets MemorialCare acquired from Universal Care in Signal Hill late last year with a view of creating a state-licensed health plan. It will provide care through its hospitals; about 300 affiliated physicians; and a network of ambulatory surgery centers, imaging centers and retail outpatient clinics.

Seaside is named after Long Beach’s first hospital, which opened in 1907 and is known today as Long Beach Memorial. Seaside starts with 14,000 members it inherited in the Universal deal.

It also hopes to get a bigger slice of the state’s MediCal business – and take advantage of its expertise at Miller Children’s – by participating in a demonstration project designed to better monitor children from low-income families with chronic health conditions.

“We started in the greater Long Beach-South Bay because that’s where Universal primarily operated, but will eventually expand operations into Orange County when the time is right” said Jay Davis, Seaside’s senior vice president, who moved over from Universal in the acquisition.

Working Up the Ranks

Michael Jongsma was a so-so student at his Redondo Beach high school and never thought he’d go to college. But six years after working his way up from busboy to manager of a South Bay chain restaurant in the mid-1980s, he decided it was time for career change that would be more compatible with raising a family.

He found his calling in health care, working his way up as he had done in the restaurant industry. Jongsma last month was named chief nursing officer at Torrance’s Little Co. of Mary Medical Center after holding the job on an interim basis since the beginning of the year.

As a result, Jongsma, 45, is now in management at the 436-bed Providence Health & Services hospital where he and two of his four children were born. It’s been 23 years since he earned his emergency medical technician certificate and began driving an ambulance for a living. He eventually was invited to apply for an EMT job in the emergency department of another local hospital and came to Little Co. of Mary in 1999. After earning an associate of science degree in nursing at Los Angeles Harbor College, he got a job in the cardiac unit of Little Co. of Mary and became manager there in 2007.

Over the years, he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and is working on his doctorate through an online university program. Jongsma said he was inspired by an uncle, now retired from the Los Angeles Fire Department, who was one of the department’s first paramedics.

“It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you find your passion,” he said. “I knew I loved caring for people and enjoyed the human connection and the opportunity to help people heal.”

As the hospital’s CNO, Jongsma plans to lead a team in designing an evidence-based nursing plan that will earn Little Co. of Mary a magnet hospital designation from the American Nurses Credentialing Center.

“I don’t get to do as much direct patient care these days, but in a sense all the patients here are my patients now,” he said.


Supplement Bet

William Stiritz, who runs the company that makes Grape-Nuts and Raisin Bran cereals, has joined billionaire investors Carl Icahn and George Soros in taking a significant stake in nutritional supplement distributor Herbalife Ltd.

Stiritz, chief executive of Post Holdings Inc. in St. Louis, late last month disclosed that he had personally accumulated more than 5.38 million shares of downtown L.A.-based Herbalife. That gives him a 5.2 percent stake, making him the company’s fourth largest individual shareholder.

Icahn, Herbalife’s largest single shareholder with a 16 percent stake, and Soros, now No. 6 with a 4.9 percent stake, this year became the two highest-profile investors in the nutritional supplement maker. The company has been under attack for months from hedge fund manager Bill Ackman.

Ackman, who has taken short positions in Herbalife in hopes that the company’s share price would fall, contends that the direct-distributor business operates as an illegal pyramid scheme. The share price of the company, which has long denied the allegations, has roller-coastered in the past year. Shares closed Sept. 4 at $64.14, up 146 percent from late December, when Ackman launched his campaign.

Staff reporter Deborah Crowe can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 232.