Colorado will lose $787 million in health care funds for low-income people during the next five years if proposed Bush administration cuts to Medicaid take effect, according to a new congressional report.
The cuts would reduce payments to Denver Health, the city’s safety-net hospital, and cut funds for medical education, reducing low-income patients’ access to teaching hospital clinics.
The Bush administration said the trim in Medicaid expenditures would cost states $15 billion. The House oversight committee says it will cost more than three times that, nearly $50 billion.
“The regulations put the financial stability of the entire safety-net provider community in Colorado at risk,” Gov. Bill Ritter and Joan Henneberry, executive director of the state Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, told the House committee in a Feb. 15 letter.
“We are, like every state, very concerned,” Henneberry said Monday.
The White House’s plan would define safety-net hospitals more narrowly, cutting Medicaid funding to hospitals including Denver Health, University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora, and Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs, the committee analysis says.
Those hospitals get more-generous reimbursement than others through Medicaid because they treat so many poor and uninsured patients.
The hospital changes would mean $142 million less per year in Colorado, Henneberry calculated.
Under another proposed change, Medicaid would no longer support graduate medical education.
In Colorado, that would mean $12 million less a year — funding that now goes to about 1,150 fellows and residents at 14 institutions across the state, according to a report Henneberry compiled for the House committee.
100,000 patients
Those doctors-in-training provided care for about 100,000 Medicaid and low-income patients last year, Henneberry wrote.
“If the thrust and the intent of reform is to increase people’s access to health care, what this does is exactly the opposite,” said Elisabeth Arenales, health care program director of the Colorado Center on Law and Policy.
One change, which went into effect Monday, cut money for “targeted-case managers” who help coordinate health care for high-needs populations.
Henneberry said her department has not yet been able to calculate how many people that affects, but Colorado has received about $1.8 million in federal assistance per year for targeted-case management. “We are clearly on the record opposing these rules and regulations,” Henneberry said.
The changes most onerous to Colorado — those that affect hospitals and medical schools — are due to take effect in May unless Congress takes action, she said. Henneberry said she and the governor have been in contact with Colorado’s delegation, trying to push implementation of the rules “well into the next administration, so we can start working with another president to undo them.”
Today, the Colorado legislature’s Joint Budget Committee will hear testimony from Denver Health and University Hospital about possible state regulations that would make those hospitals fit under the more narrow, proposed definition of “safety net.”
Katy Human: 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com
