SNAP Takes Position on State Medicaid Funding After Hahnemann Closure
Pennsylvania’s Medicaid resources should follow now-closed Hahnemann University Hospital’s Medicaid patients as those patients turn to new providers, the Safety-Net Association of Pennsylvania declared in a position statement issued this week.
According to SNAP,
…the best way to protect access to care and prevent additional financial strain on Philadelphia hospitals is to ensure that all state resources reallocated in the wake of Hahnemann University Hospital’s closure follow the displaced patients.
In preparation for addressing this challenge, SNAP performed a data-based analysis of where Medicaid patients turned for care upon the closing of St. Joseph’s Hospital, like Hahnemann a high-volume Medicaid provider and located in the same community as Hahnemann, in 2016. This analysis identified where patients went when St. Joseph’s closed and in its position statement, SNAP urges state policy-makers to perform similar analyses and ensure that state Medicaid resources, especially supplemental payments made to hospitals that serve especially large numbers of Medicaid patients, be distributed to the hospitals that actually serve displaced Hahnemann patients. Such an approach, SNAP maintains, is the best way to ensure the future of the health care safety net in Philadelphia.
Learn more in the SNAP position statement “Protecting Philadelphia’s Health Care Safety Net From the Financial Implications of the Closing of Hahnemann University Hospital.”
The proposal will be considered by the Senate Health and Human Services Committee.
In addition, another two million people would be eligible for Medicaid if their states expanded their Medicaid program as authorized by the Affordable Care Act.
According to a new Commonwealth Fund analysis,
The new Department of Homeland Security regulation, while focused on applicants for entry into the U.S., could have the unintended effect of discouraging legal immigrants from enrolling in Medicaid, CHIP, and other government programs and even lead them to disenroll from such programs out of a mistaken concern that participating in such programs could jeopardize their status as legal immigrants. The Kaiser Family Foundation, in fact, estimates that two to three million people will leave Medicaid and CHIP because of the new regulation.
The decline results, according to the news release, from a combination of prevention, rescue, and treatment. These and efforts, including the distribution of free naloxone, a drug that helps rescue those who have overdosed on some drugs, have been funded in part by a grant from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and Pennsylvania’s own Substance Use Disorder Loan Repayment Program, which assists health care professionals who work in the behavioral health field with the cost of their education.
The report details individual hospital performance on these procedures, including in-hospital mortality, complications, and extended post-operative length of stay. In addition, it breaks down hospital performance for all of these measures and all of these procedures based on patient age, income, gender, geographic location, and race and ethnicity.
The new requirements apply both to Medicaid fee for service and managed care programs and all of these steps must be completed by the end of calendar year 2019.
As envisioned by the state, the current program, in which individual counties contract independently with transportation providers to serve their residents on Medicaid, was to be replaced by a regional approach in which the state contracts with three vendors to serve all of Pennsylvania. Objections by members of the state legislature and county officials, however, led to legislation that requires the Department of Human Services, Department of Transportation, and Department of Aging to study the implications of such a change for patients and taxpayers and to report their preliminary findings to the legislature in September.