Hartford is exploiting an anomaly in the Medicaid program to extract billions from the U.S. Treasury, not to finance health care, but rather to finance otherwise unaffordable state spending, primarily state employee health care and retirement benefits.
This anomaly, or “shell game” (the term used in a U.S. Senate committee report) operates through the hospital tax. While all states impose this tax, no state imposes nearly as high a hospital tax rate. That’s what former Office of Policy and Management Director Ben Barnes told me in late 2017. He said Connecticut’s hospital tax scheme requires explicit federal approval, because the roughly 9% rate exceeds a 6% threshold that no other state exceeds.
The Medicaid program is a federal-state partnership providing medical care to poor citizens, with the federal government reimbursing states for about one-half to two-thirds of allowable fees and costs that hospitals and others charge Medicaid patients for medical care. Under Obamacare, Connecticut and other states expanded Medicaid in return for much higher federal reimbursement percentages on the patients newly covered.
Apart from this straightforward reimbursement arrangement, states provide hospitals supplemental payments, with the federal government matching the payments, in order to achieve various policy objectives. The hospital tax exploits this supplemental payment mechanism in a manner which the General Accountability Office criticized strongly in a 2014 report.
Let’s start with some fundamental questions. Why is government taxing hospitals, which only serves to raise the cost of the nation’s primary providers of health care. Many are non-profit. Why tax non-profits? Many are for-profit and already pay corporate income taxes. Why levy a second tax? Hospital taxes are truly strange and wonderful.
Just before Christmas, the Connecticut General Assembly went into a special session, to approve unanimously a plan to extend the state’s stratospheric hospital tax for seven years. The plan will generate about $675 million annually, including $375 million in federal matching funds.
The plan requires the approval of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), which may not be forthcoming. In mid-2018, a U.S. Senate committee took a look at hospital taxes and issued a report calling hospital taxes “a shell game” and singling out Connecticut as a major perpetrator.
Continue Reading: