"Medicare gives state hospitals $275m lift; Other regions rip change in rules" August 05, 2011|By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff
Massachusetts hospitals will get $275 million more a year in Medicare payments because of a provision inserted into the nation’s new health care law that benefits the state, angering hospitals across the country that will get less money as a result.
Related: Memory Hole: Why the Nation Doesn't Need Massachusetts Health Care
Also see: Partners HealthCare nets $51.7 million in third quarter
Now you know where the overcharges are going.
Medicare adopted the change last week, as required by an amendment to the health care law cosponsored by Senator John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat.
The amendment essentially requires Medicare to reimburse all Massachusetts hospitals for employee wages at at least the same rate that it reimburses Nantucket Cottage Hospital, a windfall that Partners HealthCare set in motion in 2007, when the Nantucket hospital became its subsidiary. Wages on the island are hefty because of its isolated location and high cost of living.
“You have this small hospital, sitting on an island in the Atlantic Ocean, having a profound impact on hospital payments across the country,’’ said Herb Kuhn, president of the Missouri Hospital Association.
Kerry’s amendment requires that the money for Medicare hospital wage reimbursements be a fixed amount nationally, rather than a fixed amount for each state, meaning that any increase for Massachusetts requires a decrease for other states.
Kuhn called it an example of “Yankee ingenuity’’ in a column he wrote last week for his association newsletter. Steve Brenton, president of the Wisconsin Hospital Association, said he is “extremely upset’’ that Massachusetts engineered “a money grab’’ won through “political hardball.’’
Most of the people in Massachusetts have no idea how despised they are in the rest of the country. And why would they with propaganda organs like the Globe sowing supremacist division and telling us we are better than everyone else?
Kerry, who cosponsored the amendment with Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, defended the provision yesterday. He said that when the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services previously changed its wage reimbursement rules five years ago, it hurt Massachusetts. The state, he said, is making up lost ground.
“The rest of the country gained at our expense, and Massachusetts took a big hit,’’ he said in a statement. “These new rules just provide some correction.’’
Is that what you call health gouging?
Timothy Gens, executive vice president of the Massachusetts Hospital Association, said the state’s hospitals “lost hundreds of millions of dollars’’ and “we didn’t criticize other states’’ then.
Kerry and Gens also pointed out that, despite criticism from some other hospitals, the American Hospital Association - as well as hospitals in New Jersey, Connecticut, and California - supported the amendment to the Affordable Care Act, which will extend health insurance to most Americans. The Associated Press, which first reported on the provision yesterday, said six other states also come out ahead, although none do as well as Massachusetts....
Alan Sager, professor at Boston University School of Public Health, agreed that the state could face retribution. In Medicare financing, “if some people gain money, other people suffer from reductions in money,’’ he said. “There’s payback, and Massachusetts hospitals can count on other states and their senators and representatives paying us back.’’
Medicare and the Institute of Medicine, an independent advisory organization, are both working on recommendations for reforming Medicare’s system for reimbursing hospital wages. That means the increase coming to Massachusetts hospitals this October may not be permanent.
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