Bush Cuts Outpatient Medicaid Services
Bush Cuts Outpatient Medicaid Services
After arguing that legislation to cut over-payments to private insurers would “harm beneficiaries by taking private health plan options away from them,” President Bush, on Friday, “narrowed the scope of services that can be provided to poor people under Medicaid’s outpatient hospital benefit.”
The new regulation arrives at a time when states are considering limiting Medicaid eligibility and Americans are losing their employer health benefits. In fact, the administration issued its rule to take public “health options away” on the very same day that the Department of Labor announced that the U.S. unemployment rate is at a 14-year high of 6.5 percent.
“Public hospitals and state officials immediately protested the action, saying it would reduce Medicaid payments to many hospitals at a time of growing need,” the New York Times reports. Ann Clemency Kohler, the executive director of the National Association of State Medicaid Directors, said:
The new rule is a pretty sweeping change from longtime Medicaid policy. Since the beginning of the program, states have been allowed to define hospital outpatient services. We have to question why the rule is being issued now, three days after the election, with a new administration coming in.
Bush’s last-minute effort to deny public health care benefits to millions of Americans squares with his health care legacy, however. As recently as February 2008, Bush proposed cutting Medicaid by $18.2 billion over five years, essentially “shifting costs to the states” and forcing “states to institute even bigger program cuts or tax increases,” according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). In January of 2008, the Bush administration imposed restrictions on the “ability of states to expand eligibility for Medicaid, in an effort to prevent them from offering coverage to families of modest incomes.”
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3 Responses to “Bush Cuts Outpatient Medicaid Services”
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The Medicaid cut will impact hospitals serving large numbers of Medicaid patients. They also are the big providers of care for the uninsured.
While Detroit and Wall Street talk about spin off effects from loss of employment, there are morbidity and mortality impacts from Bush’s new regulation.
Nonprofit community and teaching hospitals will take the brunt of the hurt from this rule change. That means turning away more people for truly nonemergent conditions.
As the nonprofit hospital sector craters, they’ll look for funding. Credit remains tight and unavailable for risky, i.e. stressed institutions.
Some will look for merger partners, but many will make the same sense as combining Chrysler and GM. Merging two dogs makes for a bigger dog.
So who will ride in to buy the distressed hospital on the cheap? Their for-profit hospital owners who have a much sweeter payor mix and access to capital through their large corporate structures.
More disaster capitalism from Bush.
November 9th, 2008 at 10:24 amDisaster capitalism is still in play.
http://www.linktv.org/programs/warning
The shock to marginal people and safety net hospitals will be real. Capitalist for-profit chains can and will take advantage.
Jeb Bush sits on the board of Tenet Healthcare, a large proprietary hospital chain.
November 9th, 2008 at 11:09 amI have experienced the healthcare model they have in the UK and what we have here. I would be very happy to have a single payer and to get rid of the useless parasites such as Tenet which provide no benefit other than to their bank accounts on the backs of others.
November 9th, 2008 at 6:23 pm