At rural Pa. hospitals, a tense wait as Congress weighs funding changes
SOUTH RENOVO, Pa. — Up Route 120 in north-central Pennsylvania, in an old logging town amid a seemingly endless swath of state forests pocked with hunting camps and one-lane bridges, sits one of the most isolated hospitals in the state.
Bucktail Medical Center, a one-story building on the outskirts of town, doubles as the local nursing home. It has two emergency-room bays, 21 acute-care beds, one physician on hand at any given time, and an ever-precarious bottom line. At a larger hospital, the nursing director’s list of duties would employ five people. Officials here are still saving up to buy their first CT scanner.
And as the GOP’s health-care bill winds its way through Congress, the staff is watching with bated breath. Like many other rural hospitals known as “critical-access hospitals,” it relies heavily on federal funding from Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements — for Bucktail, which has a $6 million operating budget, it’s nearly 80 percent of its revenue.
“If changes are made to the way Medicaid is funded in the states — if critical-access hospitals are now back to serving higher numbers of uninsured patients, if they have to go back to providing uncompensated care — that is a death knell to their bottom line,” said Lisa Davis, the director of the state Office of Rural Health.
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Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.), one of the critics of the GOP bills, said facilities like Bucktail would be “crushed” by the proposed changes.
“People who use critical-access hospitals don’t have big-time lobbyists to make their case, but they are our neighbors, too, and their well-being should matter,” Casey said in an email. “Would any of the Senators and Representatives voting for this bill endanger the only hospital in the community where their family lived?”
His Republican counterpart in the state, Sen. Pat Toomey, has been among the most vocal advocates for the changes. Toomey insists the plans, which he helped draft, would not cut Medicaid but just slow its growth.
“These are cuts in the rate of growth,” he said in an appearance on Morning Joe last Monday. “The rural hospitals are going to be able to manage this.”
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Part of me is just daring the Repubs to pass this crap....unfortunately, this would cause a lot of hurt to people and if the economy starts crapping out it will eventually impact all of us and I don't think the other side would admit to their mistake or let it be fixed.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/rural-hospitals-medicaid-cuts-senate-bill-20170716.html