A bunch of rural hospitals are upset about a provision of Obamacare that benefits Massachusetts above all other states. Forgive the bureaucratese, but you really have to read the Medicare Price Control Payment Advisory Commission’s description to appreciate the situation:
Among the proposed wage index reclassifications or exceptions granted to hospitals for FY2012, the rural floor exception triggered in the state of Massachusetts will have a large impact on hospital payments. Beginning in FY 2012, the conversion of Nantucket Cottage Hospital from a critical access hospital to an IPPS hospital will trigger the rural floor wage index exception for the 60 urban hospitals in the state of Massachusetts, increasing wage indexes for these hospitals from an average of 1.16 in FY2011 to 1.35 in FY2012. Nantucket Cottage Hospital is a rural island hospital, which has 15 inpatient beds and serves approximately 150 Medicare inpatients per year. This hospital will become the only rural IPPS hospital in the state of Massachusetts. As a result of this change in one small hospital’s status, and the subsequent change in the wage index, payment rates for urban hospitals in Massachusetts will increase by 8 percent, or by more than $200 million in FY 2012. These extra payments will be made budget neutral at the national level, and therefore all hospitals—including rural hospitals—will absorb the financial loss.
Got that? One small, rural, island hospital in Massachusetts changes its Medicare status, and—presto!—the other 60 Massachusetts hospitals suddenly qualify for an extra $200 million in Medicare subsidies. Land of the free! A letter from several state hospital associations complains the amount is actually $367 million per year. The best part: Medicare scrounges up that $200-$367 million by reducing subsidies to other states. Thus the nasty letter from the lobbyists for non-Massachusetts hospitals.
Cato adjunct scholar David Hyman writes about this dynamic in his excellent satire, Medicare Meets Mephistopheles:
Geographically based envy has also precipitated a “formula fight” among the states, complete with litigation, coalitions of aggrieved states and senior citizens, coverage in newspapers and editorials, and statements from concerned legislators… [C]ertain state medical societies have been particularly insistent that their states are being shortchanged by the Medicare program. These interest groups have had great success in persuading their elected representatives to change Medicare’s reimbursement formulas, so the Medicare money train unloads their “fair share.”
I’ve written before about how Romneycare solidified layers of corruption whereby Massachusetts officials (with the complicity of the Bush administration) bilked taxpayers in the other 49 states. It turns out that Obamacare also has a sweetheart deal for Massachusetts. Who knew Romneycare and Obamacare had so much in common?
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