Children’s Hospital will lose $7 million in medical student training money under President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for next year.
The Obama budget, a starting point in the debate that will be under further cutting pressure from Republicans, wipes out a national pediatric training program.
Children’s, on the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, has received an average of $7 million a year to host more residents, conduct research and expand care for underserved patients, officials said.
Cutting the medical student program across the country “would have a dramatic negative effect on the pediatric workforce pipeline at a time when children’s timely access to care is already impaired,” said Lawrence McAndrews, president of the National Association of Children’s Hospitals.
McAndrews said stopping the program would worsen an existing shortage in pediatric specialists that already results in long wait times for care. The $317.5 million budget helped pay for 5,631 residents nationally, the hospital group said.
The program would be replaced, in part, by a much smaller pot of national “competitive grant” money, but a Children’s Hospital spokeswoman said it wouldn’t come close to training enough pediatricians even if Children’s could win some of the money in some years.
“The Children’s Hospital will work aggressively to preserve the program,” she said.
The Obama budget proposal for 2012 also gave a shock to Colorado Medicaid proponents.
Two years ago, Colorado hospitals agreed to tax themselves to pay for a major expansion of care to the poor, with the blessing of an Obama administration that fervently hopes to insure more Americans.
Now that hospital provider fee is under attack by the administration itself. Federal budget officials saw costs skyrocketing as many states used the provider tax to leverage Medicaid matching funds, and now want to ratchet down the fees to help cut the deficit.
“We’re taking the view this is not good, and we’re engaging the congressional delegation,” said Steven Summer, president of the Colorado Hospital Association.
State Medicaid and hospital officials worry the provider tax cap by Obama would stunt a major Colorado initiative before it’s fully in place.
With the support of hospitals, the 2009 legislature passed a provider fee on inpatient and outpatient hospital bills. Because the money was to go toward expansion of eligibility for Medicaid and the Child Health Plan Plus insurance program, it pulls in federal matching dollars through Medicaid.
It was to generate $600 million for the underinsured in Colorado within a few years; most hospitals believed they get more back for treating the underinsured than they pay in the tax.
The fee, currently at 3.5 percent of overall hospital revenue, rises in coming years as Colorado’s affordable care act expands. It would eventually climb to about 6 percent to cover tens of thousands more people. The Obama proposal would ratchet down qualifying state fees to 4.5 percent in 2015, and 3.5 percent by 2017. That would save the federal budget $3.5 billion over five years.
At the same time, last year’s federal Affordable Care Act greatly expands eligibility for Medicaid beginning in 2014, and offers federal money to do it. It’s not clear yet whether that promise of expanded federal matching would make up for limits on the Colorado provider fee, said hospital association vice president Tom Nash.
“There are a lot of moving parts,” he said.
Michael Booth: 303-954-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com
