The Advance Arkansas Institute has released a new report about the impact of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion on Arkansas hospitals. In short, Obamacare-Medicaid expansion is a loser for hospitals all the way around. Here are some of the key findings of the report:
The problem of hospitals’ uncompensated care is driven primarily by bad debt, which the private option does not address;
The problem of hospital bad debt, and uncompensated care generally, is likely overstated by hospitals’ use of “charge basis” accounting;
The private option will weaken hospital balance sheets by increasing both their bad debt and their undercompensated Medicaid costs;
The private option will increase both the costs and the burdens in already-strained Arkansas hospital emergency rooms;
The Affordable Care Act’s scheduled Medicaid cuts which supposedly justified the private option – like the Affordable Care Act’s scheduled employer mandate – never happened.
The paper is authored by Dan Greenberg, president of AAI, and Shane Stacks, a Pulaski County Justice of the Peace. Read the full report here.
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