Last month, Pennsylvania’s Medical Assistance program stopped paying hospitals for the inpatient care they provide to healthy babies newly born to Medical Assistance-covered mothers.  The hospital industry – including the Safety-Net Association of Pennsylvania (SNAP) – immediately expressed opposition to this new policy and has continued to seek the restoration of these payments as the state legislature considers Pennsylvania’s fiscal year 2013 budget.
Now, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has weighed in on this issue – on the side of the hospital industry and the low-income patients it serves – with an editorial entitled “Dropping the baby:  DPW is wrong to cut newborns’ hospital care.”  Read that editorial here.