The Tennessee Hospital Association’s board of directors voted unanimously on Monday to support a tax on hospitals to help bolster hospitals that treat TennCare patients and offset steep cuts to the state’s Medicaid program.
“This proposal is designed to be a gap-financing plan, a one-year plan to see if we can’t get through to a better solution instead of a massive reduction in funding,” Jim Brexler, chairman of the board of the hospital association, said in a prepared statement during a conference call with reporters on Monday.
Mr. Brexler is also president and CEO of Erlanger hospital.
Hospitals that receive certified public expenditures from the government to offset charity care, including Erlanger hospital in Chattanooga, would be exempt from the fee, which would aim to raise at most $200 million from hospitals.
The fee would likely come in the form of a 1 percent to 2 percent tax on hospitals’ net revenues, which would go back into the Medicaid program and be used to draw down federal matching funds, officials said. The money would go into a trust fund to ensure that federal matching funds would be spent on hospital services, said Craig Becker, president and CEO of the Tennessee Hospital Association.
Under an enhanced federal matching rate, the federal government pays $3 for every $1 the state spends on TennCare.
The board of the association, the major lobbying and advocacy group for hospitals in the state, is willing to accept a tax on their revenues in an effort to offset what they say will be a $540 million hole in TennCare hospital reimbursements next year, under Gov. Phil Bredesen’s proposed fiscal year 2011 budget.
For complete details see tomorrow’s Chattanooga Times Free Press.
Health care reporter Emily Bregel has worked at the Chattanooga Times Free Press since July 2006. She previously covered banking and wrote for the Life section. Emily, a native of Baltimore, Md., earned a bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Columbia University. She received a first-place award for feature writing from the East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists’ Golden Press Card Contest for a 2009 article about a boy with a congenital heart defect. She ...
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