MO Wasting Millions of Dollars in Overpaying Medicaid to Hospitals
The Associated Press article which came out on Labor Day begins “Hospitals have received hundreds of millions of extra Medicaid dollars over the past few years as a result of a quiet deal intended to soften the blow of Missouri’s 2005 Medicaid cuts.” Should you be outraged? Yes, you should. That “quiet deal” resulted in hospitals being overpaid YOUR TAX DOLLARS!
Have you noticed the building boom of hospitals all over Missouri? The joke in Jefferson City is to ask “is that a one or a two crane hospital?” when the topic comes up. I asked for financial data from the department, and was given a spreadsheet revealing that in 2006, Missouri hospitals netted $761 million dollars. That would be AFTER providing all the charity care and bad debt care and paying hospital administrators their inflated salaries. So why would the department make a sweet deal to overpay hospitals by hundreds of millions of dollars when they were ALREADY making such a gigantic profit?
Taxpayers need an immediate and full accounting of all campaign contributions made by hospitals, their executives, and their various political action committees, including who received the money and when they received it in relation to this "quiet deal".
Having handled it in the House, I remember very well two years ago when we passed the Medicaid Reform bill, which included a provision to implement a pilot project to see if a “premium offset program” would save the state money. We also included about thirteen million dollars in the budget for the program. But that fall, Governor Blunt rolled out the “Insure Missouri” plan and claimed he was authorized to spend $233 million each year on it. He wasn’t, and it took a while, but our Healthcare Transformation Committee studied the plan and showed that it would have resulted in an approximate $100 million a year windfall for Missouri hospitals.
Insure Missouri was clearly illegal, and our committee members signed a letter to Secretary of State Robin Carnahan telling her so. Only when the threat became real that she would not publish the emergency rules needed to implement the plan did Governor Blunt withdraw it, after which Senator Shields (a hospital executive) led the Senate to pass a major Medicaid expansion. It, too, would have resulted in an approximate $100 million a year windfall for Missouri hospitals. Lobbying by the Missouri Hospital Association killed the bill after our committee removed the windfall provisions and added others to lower health care costs for all Missourians. Instead of covering only able-bodied parents, our bill would have covered people who cannot get insurance because no insurer would cover them.
Now it comes to light that the plan Senator Shields led the Senate to pass THIS year (and which, like the previous year's bill, also would have generated a huge windfall for Missouri hospitals) was to be financed in part by the overpayments hospitals were already getting from this “quiet deal”!
Fellow citizens, this is not small change we are talking about here. This is about HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF TAXPAYER DOLLARS. This is about public money given to hospitals by a quiet deal implemented through the complicated wording of regulations that very few people understand.
Are you outraged yet?
I am, and I intend to help pass legislation to stop this abuse. It is right for hospitals to be paid their reasonable cost using a simple, accurate and transparent method. Overpaying them to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars demands investigation and reform.
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