Laid off from Children's Hospital Los Angeles.

What Children's Hospital Los Angeles layoffs have meant for employees

After the 2025 cut, CHLA said it would offer a group of affected employees options to transfer to adjusted roles while the restructuring unfolded, as KTLA reported from the hospital's release. Hospital officials also said CHLA had already frozen hiring, canceled open positions on teams it considered adequately staffed and moved to lower what it paid for supplies, part of what the Los Angeles Business Journal called a string of cost-cutting measures. Management roles were part of the reductions, with chief executive Paul S. Viviano saying cuts to "both team member and management roles" were needed for the hospital to "continue to survive in this uncertain climate."

The pressure CHLA named was Medi-Cal, California's Medicaid program, and the hospital's books show how much of its business runs through it. In the fiscal year CHLA closed on June 30, 2025, Medi-Cal patients accounted for 68.9% of its net patient service revenue, up from 65% a year earlier, CHLA's audited financial statements show. Nearly a third of that revenue, 29.3%, came through California's Hospital Fee Program and the Children's Hospital Supplemental Payment Program, money the statements include in the Medi-Cal total, and the supplemental program's $53.5 million that year has no entry in the year before. The same statements, in figures they mark as unaudited, put the unpaid cost of treating Medi-Cal and low-income patients beyond what government payments covered at $539.5 million that year, up from $306.2 million. Expenses outran revenues in both years, by $77.7 million and then $47.1 million, and state figures the Business Journal cited put CHLA's operating margin at negative 9.9% in 2023 and negative 6% in 2024. So the 2025 cut came at a hospital that relied on a single public payer for most of its patient revenue and had lost money in every year those figures cover.

For anyone who left CHLA with severance, one California rule is worth knowing. EDD's Benefit Determination Guide treats severance pay as something other than wages for unemployment insurance, and paying it all at once or spread out over time doesn't change that. EDD's conditions start with a company plan or policy that pays a group of employees let go for reasons such as job elimination or a reduction in force, and CHLA tied its severance to hospital policy for roles eliminated in a restructuring. The plan doesn't have to cover everyone, only a class or group such as salaried, hourly or represented employees or management. EDD also treats the usual reasons employers give for severance, such as extra help while people look for work or a bridge between jobs, as meeting its test that the payment supplement unemployment benefits. Pay in lieu of notice works the other way. EDD's section on that pay calls it wages, warns that a payment's label doesn't settle the question, and counts payments made even though the required notice was given as a supplement to unemployment benefits rather than wages.

If EDD decides a CHLA payment to you really was pay in lieu of notice, which depends on the hospital's policy rather than on what the payment was called, that section says a claimant isn't eligible for benefits during the period the pay was intended to cover. If EDD's interviewer asks about a CHLA severance payment, you can have any paperwork the hospital gave you about it at hand, since EDD tells its interviewers to establish what a payment is for, why the employer is making it and whether you had to do anything to receive it. You can find out how to file on our California unemployment benefits page.