As powerful special interests continue to pressure lawmakers to enact harmful Medicare cuts to hospital care, their misleading rhetoric is drawing attention from experts who are setting the record straight, demonstrating how proposed Medicare cuts would put patients and the hospitals they count on at risk.
InsideHealthPolicy reports:
In a Feb. 7 memo titled “Anti-hospital Group Misleads on Site-neutral Impact on Rural Access to Care,” Aaron Wesolowski, AHA’s vice president of research strategy and policy communications, slams Arnold Ventures’ latest one-pager as disingenuous and misleading.
“Once again, the anti-hospital, billionaire-backed Arnold Ventures is pushing its anti-hospital agenda with a ‘report’ that is so disingenuous and has so many limitations that it cannot be taken seriously,” Wesolowski writes. “In this case, a one-pager from the group twists numbers to make the Orwellian claim that ‘site-neutral payment reforms will protect rural patients.’ They go on to diminish the extent to which rural hospitals serve their communities and flippantly write-off the proposed site-neutral cuts facing rural hospitals as ‘minimal.’”
AHA argues that the rural hospitals facing impacts from the Lower Costs, More Transparency Act would face $272 million in cuts over a decade. Those same hospitals already experience a -16.4% Medicare outpatient margin and a -12.1% overall Medicare margin, AHA says, meaning site-neutral reforms could drive them even further into the red.
Arnold Ventures’ one-pager says that over 60% of rural hospitals are Critical Access Hospitals — meaning they’re exempt from proposed site neutral reforms — and adds that facilities subject to reforms only account for 2% of all rural outpatient spending in Medicare … AHA calls the 2% statistic, which AV cites from a Jan. 3 brief written by independent actuarial consulting group Actuarial Research Corporation, a misleading interpretation of outpatient spending.
“It appears that what they have done is examine just a sliver of spending at the hospital outpatient departments of the affected hospitals, ignoring the true magnitude of all the services that the impacted hospitals provide to their communities,” Wesolowski says.
AHA says that although the impacted rural hospitals account for 18% of all rural outpatient prospective payment system hospitals, their spending makes up almost 40% of OPPS spending across all rural hospitals. Those hospitals also care for a third of Medicare beneficiaries seen in rural hospitals, AHA says.
AHA says those statistics are drawn from a variety of sources, including the hospital group’s 2022 annual survey, a set of sources included in a 2023 AHA fact sheet showing impacts of the site-neutral provisions in the Lower Costs, More Transparency Act, and 2022 Medicare cost reports.
“Misrepresenting the scope and importance of rural hospitals — as Arnold Ventures does — is a great disservice to the patients and communities that rely on them for access to care that too often cannot be found elsewhere and is not provided by others in the health care sector,” Wesolowski writes.
Hospitals and health systems throughout the nation provide critical care 24/7 despite being under financial strain. Yet powerful special interests, including corporate insurance companies, are lobbying Congress to enact harmful Medicare cuts that would jeopardize access to crucial services that only hospitals provide –including for patients in rural and underserved areas.
- To learn more about how cutting hospital care will harm patients, click here.