State Politics and the Fate of the Safety Net

Lacking workers' compensation coverage, injured workers rely upon a safety net of Federally provided medical benefits. Under the Affordable Care Act that safety net is shrinking. Today's post was shared by WCBlog and comes from www.nejm.org

Only 2% of acute care hospitals nationwide are safety-net facilities, but they provide 20% of uncompensated care to the uninsured. Because most are in low-income communities, they typically generate scant revenue from privately insured patients. The Medicaid Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) program was established to help defray their costs for uncompensated care. Currently, Medicaid DSH disburses $11.5 billion annually to the states, which have considerable latitude in allocating these funds. Some states carefully target their DSH payments to hospitals providing large volumes of uncompensated care, but others, such as Ohio and Georgia, spread their payments broadly, transforming the program into a de facto subsidy of their hospital industry. Because the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was expected to dramatically expand insurance coverage, safety-net hospitals were expected to need less DSH money. Therefore, to reduce the cost of expanding Medicaid, the ACA reduced Medicaid DSH funding by $18.1 billion between fiscal years 2014 and 2020. To allow time for coverage expansion to take effect, the cuts are back-loaded — starting at $500 million (4% of current national DSH spending) in 2014 but reaching $5.6 billion (49% of current spending) in 2019. The DSH cuts are so deep in part because Congress assumed that all...

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Just Go to The Emergency Room

Emergency room medicine is becoming an easy avenue for work-related medical care as employers and insurance carriers keep restricting traditional medical care access. Over the past decades it is becoming increasingly difficult for workers who have suffered occupational accidents or diseases to obtain quick, efficient and authorized diagnostic services and medical treatment.

A recent RAND study now validates that an alternate route is increasingly being used to access the medical care system, the emergency room. Few restrictions exists to enter an emergency room door. The red tape imposed by insurance carriers is eliminated, and the concept of deny and delay are non-existent in emergency room medicine.

Hospital emergency departments play a growing role in the U.S. health care system, accounting for a rising proportion of hospital admissions and serving increasingly as an advanced diagnostic center for primary care physicians, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

While often targeted as the most expensive place to get medical care, emergency rooms remain an important safety net for Americans who cannot get care elsewhere and may play a role in slowing the growth of health care costs, according to the study.

Emergency departments are now responsible for about half of all hospital admissions in the United States, accounting for nearly all of the growth in hospital admissions experienced between 2003 and 2009.

Despite evidence that people with chronic conditions such as asthma and heart failure are visiting emergency departments more frequently, the number of hospital admissions for these conditions has remained flat. Researchers say that suggests that emergency rooms may help to prevent some avoidable hospital admissions.

"Use of hospital emergency departments is growing faster than the use of other parts of the American medical system," said Dr. Art Kellermann, the study's senior author and a senior researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. "While more can be done to reduce the number of unnecessary visits to emergency rooms, our research suggests emergency rooms can play a key role in limiting growth of preventable hospital admissions."