The following is an excerpt of an article that first appeared in CalMatters.org. The full article is available here.
California agreed to pay OptumServe up to $221 million during the pandemic to coordinate and operate dozens of vaccination sites. But the health-care company’s work in at least a dozen counties has been plagued by miscommunication and staffing shortages.
Officials from at least 12 counties complained to the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) about delays and other problems with OptumServe, saying that the problems hampered their ability to get shots into arms, according to state documents obtained through a Public Records Act request.
The company has fallen far short of the up to 100,000 daily vaccine doses it told the state in its contracts that it could deliver. It has helped administer about 370,000 doses since January — just 1.1 percent of California’s nearly 34 million during that span. At several vaccine sites, OptumServe failed to deliver the minimum 420 doses it pledged to distribute each day.
At least three counties — Lassen, Madera and Tulare — stopped working with OptumServe, are taking back doses and are turning instead to community groups for running their vaccination sites. The company still has 30 sites operating in 23 counties across California.
The Brown Institute for Media Innovation’s Documenting COVID-19 project in collaboration with CalMatters reviewed thousands of pages of internal emails about OptumServe and conducted interviews with county health departments.
Over the past year, the state awarded OptumServe and its subsidiary, Logistics Health Inc., three no-bid contracts totaling up to $1 billion to run hundreds of California’s testing and vaccine sites.
Included is up to $221 million authorized through September 2021 to work on the vaccination rollout. So far, OptumServe has billed the state $4.8 million for its vaccine contract, according to figures provided by CDPH. For its two contracts for running hundreds of California testing sites, the state also agreed to pay OptumServe up to $838 million, and has already paid $282.5 million.
OptumServe is a Minnesota-based company hired by the federal government to manage health care. Its $200 billion parent company, UnitedHealth Group, is the nation’s second-largest health-care company.
UnitedHealth contributed $131,000 to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2022 re-election campaign and his standing ballot measure committee during the pandemic in December, raising questions from critics, including Bob Stern, principal co-author of the state’s Political Reform Act, about the use of no-bid contracts with politically connected contractors.
In written responses to questions, OptumServe and CDPH acknowledged missteps and attributed some early miscommunication and staffing shortages to the unprecedented nature of the pandemic and the unique challenges of delivering vaccines to all corners of California.
This article was written by two graduates of Columbia University’s Stabile Program — Caitlin Antonios, a California-based investigative journalist, and Bianca Fortis, who’s worked on Columbia Journalism Investigation's cross-border reporting project.
