Editorial: Rx for budgetary malady
Editorial Board, The World (Coos Bay)
May 27, 2011
If you're sick enough to need a hospital, you hope the hospital has the financial stability to give you top-notch care. But our state government's budget problems are putting that stability at risk.
Oregon hospital leaders made the rounds of newspaper offices last week, warning about potentially devastating cuts to the Oregon Health Plan, which provides Medicaid treatment to the needy. Gov. John Kitzhaber's budget plan was going to cut Medicaid payments by 19 percent next year, and another 15 percent the year after. Health care providers would suffer. Worse, if shrunken payments caused doctors to reject Medicaid patients, poor people would take their illnesses to emergency rooms, driving up everyone's costs.
The delegation that visited The World included officials from Bay Area Hospital and Bandon's Southern Coos Hospital. They described the financial strains already facing rural hospitals, where solvent patients and insurers inevitably pay more than their fair share, to make up for paltry government reimbursements. Two years of double-digit cutbacks would be crushing, they said. Some small hospitals might fold.
This week, state lawmakers presented a partial solution, but it's only slightly less alarming than the original problem. It's a financial gambit in which the state raises taxes on hospitals, in order to generate matching funds for federal payments. The federal money comes back to the hospitals, more than repaying them for the higher taxes.
This brazen shell game is expected to reduce hospitals' losses, at least until Congress wises up and closes the loophole. By then, Oregon leaders hope to install managed care organizations to streamline the costs of caring for poor people.
We all had better hope it works. Oregon hospitals can't keep absorbing financial calamity, and Oregon taxpayers can't afford to absorb limitless costs. The poor need health care, and taxpayers need creative systems to provide it.
Link to the story: http://theworldlink.com/news/opinion/editorial/article_8d0ec87b-8ef5-56c2-97bc-eb808f64262b.html
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