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Looks like they shifted resources from uncompensated care to taking over physician practices, building free-standing emergency rooms and duplicating services try to get customers with commercial insurance in wealthy areas.
One could only imagine how many physicians workload went from inner-city hospitals to free-standing emergency rooms in wealthy areas.
Looks like instead of using the addition Medicaid money to reduce prices on commercial and employer insurance payors, they decided to allocate the windfall for free-standing emergency rooms and duplicate services where they already had sufficient capacity.
Some of the profit-margins are 14% now in Colorado at some hospitals because the windfall of Medicaid money from Obamacare.
The profit-margin per discharge for people ion commercial health insurance is now up to $11,000 in Colorado
With our small town AZ hospital the Medicaid expansion has been about a wash. Fewer no payers, but lower reimbursements. I know of no one that thought they would be reducing any private prices.
It looks like the hospitals had somewhat free reign to do what they wanted with the extra funds and they used it to boost their own bottom lines rather than to help people by lowering prices. Sounds typical of the capitalistic free market... are you upset about this or happy that corporations got another one over on regular people? It also looks like yet another part of the ACA wasn't implemented. I wonder why Congress wanted to avoid cutting federal funding for hospitals.
Quote:
Some critics point out that hospitals are also benefiting because Congress has repeatedly delayed a key ACA provision that would have cut federal funding for hospitals with large numbers of Medicaid and uninsured patients.
The continuation of the program — called Medicaid disproportionate share payments — has provided Colorado hospitals a total of $108 million.
As far as the freestanding emergency rooms being duplicative... I only know what happened in my area. My city got a freestanding ER rather than a full hospital because there is some certificate that is needed from the state that Florida refused to give our city because something to do with competition yada yada. So in a city of 60,000 residents, we had no hospital at all. The closest ones were 20 minutes away. Now we have a freestanding ER. Not ideal, but they saved my daughter's life, so I can't complain. Of course, once they diagnosed her, we had to take an ambulance to a different hospital. We ended up at a children's hospital 90 minutes away because that's what she needed, but even if a regular hospital could have helped, we'd have needed to take an ambulance 20 minutes away. So that's unfortunate. Either way, our freestanding ER is not providing duplicate care, it's providing care that we didn't have and that we definitely needed in our city. No idea if that has to do with the Medicaid expansion.. I assume not because Florida does not participate.
Looks like they shifted resources from uncompensated care to taking over physician practices, building free-standing emergency rooms and duplicating services try to get customers with commercial insurance in wealthy areas.
One could only imagine how many physicians workload went from inner-city hospitals to free-standing emergency rooms in wealthy areas.
Looks like instead of using the addition Medicaid money to reduce prices on commercial and employer insurance payors, they decided to allocate the windfall for free-standing emergency rooms and duplicate services where they already had sufficient capacity.
Some of the profit-margins are 14% now in Colorado at some hospitals because the windfall of Medicaid money from Obamacare.
The profit-margin per discharge for people ion commercial health insurance is now up to $11,000 in Colorado
So why not just eliminate Medicaid and all other welfare handouts? No one has the right to the services of another, nor should I or anyone else be forced to pay for someone else's healthcare.
All you ever do here is post diatribes, with no real solutions.
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