When Medicaid Cuts Hit, Urban Hospitals Could Be Hit Hardest
“In a typical year, more than 100,000 Medicaid patients depend on the emergency department at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in South Los Angeles, in a predominantly Hispanic and Black community where residents have high rates of diabetes, heart failure and pneumonia.
In a sense, the hospital depends on them, too, with its fragile finances resting on payments tied to Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for the poor.
In the coming years, steep cuts to the program, enacted by Republicans in their signature policy bill this year, will destabilize this precarious balance for M.L.K. and other urban safety-net hospitals across the country.
As Republican lawmakers debated the legislation, which cut more than $1 trillion in federal health care spending to help offset large tax cuts, key senators worried the changes would shutter rural hospitals. But a new analysis led by Harvard researchers suggests that many of the hospitals most at risk of closing services — or even their doors — look more like M.L.K.”
Read more at New York Times.