From the Daily News:In a move expected to save three struggling Brooklyn hospitals, the Obama administration has finally agreed to let the state reinvest $8 billion in Medicaid savings into its health care system, Gov. Cuomo said Thursday.
Cuomo has repeatedly warned that without the approval, Brookdale Hospital, Interfaith Medical Center and Wyckoff Heights Medical Center would soon shut down.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told Cuomo Thursday that the feds are ready to sign off on the request.
The $8 billion is $2 billion less than the state had sought, but it’s enough to help remake the health care system, Cuomo said.
However Crains has this to say:
Disregard the political rhetoric prior to this week's tentative approval by federal health officials of an $8 billion grant to overhaul New York state's health care system.
The so-called Medicaid waiver is not going to prevent every struggling Brooklyn hospital from closing, let alone any specific hospital. It won't keep New York City's public health system in the black.
And the waiver has nothing to do with New York's insurance exchange created under Obamacare, a connection that Gov. Andrew Cuomo publicly made as he pushed Washington to approve the cash infusion he had sought for 19 months.
For the average New Yorker, the $8 billion grant will actually chip away at the beloved hospitals so many community groups have battled to protect in recent years. The blunt reality of the new federal funding is that community hospitals throughout the city will lose beds. Many will be a sliver of their former selves, and newly anchored to big health care delivery systems. Access to more complex medical services will require travel to another neighborhood—or another borough.
In truth, what the $8 billion in federal money will fund can't be explained in a soundbite. That is because most of it will be funneled through the complex federal Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment program, or DSRIP, embedded in similar waivers that Washington approved for New Jersey, California and Texas. The program is meant to stabilize the health care safety-net system and to cut avoidable hospitalizations and emergency-department use by 25% over the next five years.
1 comment:
Maybe if we weren't so quick to hand out medicaid to every single person who walks through the medicaid offices door, hospitals would not be in such bad shape. The hospitals only get so much from medicaid for services rendered. Which means the hospital can bill them like 30k for a 10 day stay....but the hospital will be lucky if it sees like 10k for that 30k visit. The rest of the 20k is written off from the hospitals point. Medicaid and Medicare both pay the hospitals real cheaply- they have their own standard rates on what they will pay per service per day. This is only in addition to the many illegals who walk through the emergency room doors and give fake names with made up social security numbers and addresses! I knew someone who worked in coney island hospital and they told me that they get ATLEAST 50 bills a day coming back that had a note on the envelope that said "noone by that name lives here-return to sender"! Which means the hospitals MUST take a hit with their bills due to the high Illegal population!
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