SNAP’s agenda and positions are developed by its members: leaders of safety-net hospitals like yours whose stake in Pennsylvania Medical Assistance program policies is fundamentally the same as yours.

SNAP has only one purpose: to represent the distinct needs of Pennsylvania’s private safety-net hospitals. We are highly focused; SNAP does not seek to be all things to all hospitals or to take the place of your other trade groups.

Medical malpractice? Not specifically a safety-net hospital issue. Health insurance exchanges? Medicare value-based purchasing? Your other groups are addressing those issues for you.

On the other hand, inadequate Pennsylvania Medical Assistance payments or misguided reimbursement policies? Damaging changes in the Pennsylvania Medicaid disproportionate share (Medicaid DSH) formula? Changes in the public welfare code? Those issues are why SNAP exists and those are the kinds of issues on which we focus. Concentrating on just a few issues makes SNAP the best value in Pennsylvania hospital advocacy today.

Medical Assistance is absolutely critical to the financial health of every safety-net hospital – far more so than it is for other hospitals – so Pennsylvania Medical Assistance is SNAP’s one and only policy priority. Pennsylvania Medical Assistance payment policies, Medical Assistance budget proposals, Medical Assistance legislation, Medical Assistance regulations – these are all SNAP’s primary focus, enabling the association to devote all of its energy and resources to an issue that is of paramount importance to its members.

Pennsylvania Medical Assistance issues will soon rise to a new level of importance as the state prepares to add several hundred thousand new Medicaid recipients to its rolls under the expanded eligibility criteria established in the Affordable Care Act. How the state adds them, what benefits it offers, and how it pays Pennsylvania safety-net hospitals for their care will have an enormous impact on those hospitals.

SNAP addresses its members’ needs with the right combination of skills. We have the political skills: excellent relationships with policy-makers in both the executive and legislative branches of state government. We have the technical skills: deep expertise in Medicaid policy, legislation, and regulations and an unmatched capacity to use data to analyze proposed changes and develop our own policy proposals. And we have the communication skills: the ability to speak the language of policy-makers, politicians, bureaucrats, the news media, and the public, thereby ensuring that they understand SNAP’s messages and its members’ needs.

As a member of SNAP, you play a direct role in deciding what issues the organization addresses, what positions it takes, and how it pursues those interests. Your dues buy you an association that’s your advocate on all of the relevant issues, not just some of them. Medical Assistance is so important to Pennsylvania’s safety-net hospitals that it demands this kind of attention, and through SNAP, it receives that attention – and the benefits that attention produces.