It looks like St. Bernards Healthcare of Jonesboro will be added to the list of providers that couldn’t reach an agreement with UnitedHealthcare of Minnetonka, Minnesota.
“It is highly unlikely that St. Bernards and our affiliated providers will be in-network with UnitedHealthcare after our current agreements expire,” St. Bernards spokesman Mitchell Nail told Whispers via email last week.
St. Bernards Behavioral Health Hospital and St. Bernards Counseling Center, including its affiliated psychiatrists, psychologists, advanced practice registered nurses and social workers, moved to out-of-network status with UnitedHealthcare on Jan. 4.
And if an agreement isn’t reached by March 1, more than 300 physicians and other health care providers who work for the St. Bernards Healthcare system, including those working at St. Bernards Medical Center, will move to out-of-network status with UnitedHealthcare.
St. Bernards Medical Center itself and its related facilities are expected to move to out-of-network status with UnitedHealthcare on May 1.
Crossridge Community Hospital, however, will remain in-network through a separate agreement until Jan. 1, 2025.
A UnitedHealthcare spokesperson told Whispers via email that it remains “committed to good-faith discussions with St. Bernards and are hopeful that we can work together to reach an agreement that is affordable for families and employers in Arkansas.”
But Nail said that “our problem stems from how UnitedHealthcare conducts business and writes its clinical policies, which make it difficult for us to provide care. These business practices and clinical policies delay patient care, and they add administrative costs we do not incur when working with other medical insurance companies.”
In many cases, UnitedHealthcare doesn’t pay St. Bernards for providing needed medical care, he said.
“We have tried for more than a year to find a reasonable solution that simply pays us for the services rendered,” he said. “UnitedHealthcare, meanwhile, refuses to discuss terms.”
Meanwhile, as of Wednesday morning, Baptist Health of Little Rock has been out of UnitedHealthcare’s network since Jan. 1 because they couldn’t make a deal.
But a Baptist Health spokeswoman told Whispers that Baptist and UnitedHealth are still working on negotiations and she couldn’t comment further.
The UnitedHealthcare spokesperson said, “We want to bring Baptist Health back into our network and are committed to continuing to engage in productive negotiations.”
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