(Long Island, NY) The competition for funding will be intense this budget season and hospital advocates will make their voices heard in Albany in the weeks leading up to a final budget deal. On March 5, 2014, hospital leaders from the Suburban Hospital Alliance regions will bring their concerns directly to lawmakers in Albany. In January, Governor Cuomo unveiled his $142 billion executive budget for state fiscal year 2014 – 2015. It calls for total Medicaid spending growth of about 3.8 percent, which is the spending cap set for the upcoming fiscal year.
The Medicaid Global Spending cap was enacted as part of the state budget two years ago. Since that time, despite significant increases in Medicaid enrollment, Medicaid spending has remained under the cap. Hospitals have done their part through delivery reforms and new payment structures to ensure that statewide Medicaid spending did not pierce the cap. This is in spite of the fact that hospitals endured an annual across-the-board, two-percent cut to Medicaid reimbursements.
Language in last year’s state budget calls for eliminating this two-percent Medicaid cut to hospitals effective April 1, 2014, if the cap is not pierced. Hospitals also seek a portion of the savings to be gained by acceptance by the federal government of the state’s Medicaid waiver. An agreement in principle reached last week with the federal government would send $8 billion in federal savings to New York to help it continue to implement Medicaid reforms. In its last communication with the state, the federal government indicated that reinvestment in New York’s Medicaid program would come by way of strategies to reduce potentially preventable hospitalizations, existing and enhanced managed care contract requirements, and more reforms designed to better coordinate care.
Published bi-monthly by the Suburban Hospital Alliance of New York State, LLC, a consortium of 51 not-for-profit and public hospitals advocating for better health care policy for all those living and working in the nine counties north and east of New York City.
