Hospitals Cutting Care in Medicaid Opt-Out States
With 15 U.S. states opting out of President Barack Obama’s Medicaid expansion, hospitals that treat poor and uninsured patients are asking the government to delay $64 billion in planned funding cuts.
Medicaid funds to hospitals with a disproportionate share of low-income patients will be cut 50 percent, or $14.1 billion, from fiscal 2014 through 2019, according to draft regulations to be published in the Federal Register tomorrow. The American Hospital Association wants to delay by two years the start of the cuts for Medicaid and for $49.9 billion in reductions by Medicare, the health program for the elderly and disabled.
“They decided not to look at the effect of health care reform,” Tom Nickels, senior vice president for federal relations in Washington for the hospital association, said in a telephone interview today. “They don’t penalize states that have chosen not to expand.”
The reductions are mandated by President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and were supposed to be offset by an increase in the number of patients who would gain insurance through an expansion of state Medicaid programs. With some Republican-led states deciding not to cooperate, a loss of funding without a gain in more insured patients would hamper hospitals ability to keep caring for underserved populations.
“It’s a kick in the gut,” said John Bluford, chief executive officer of Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City, Missouri, which estimates it may lose as much as $150 million in Medicaid payments over seven years. “These are real dollars. It would wipe out our margins.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-14/hospitals-prepare-to-cut-care-in-medicaid-opt-out-states.html?cmpid=yhoo
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