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10/15/2007
Bait and switch - or blackmail - or both?
Out of the blue last week, the Wisconsin Hospital Association (WHA) removed its objection to Governor Doyle’s brand new $418M Hospital Tax.
As the WHA noted “the proposal that is in front of us today is significantly different than the proposal that was in front of us in February and even since September."
Well, that’s no kidding. Doyle asked the feds in June for approval to recalculate hospital Medicaid reimbursements. The recalc’s, approved in September, got the WHA some of what they’d been asking for and lo and behold, they do a switcheroo, support the huge new tax, and paint the Assembly into a corner.
The La Crosse Trib writes:In an interview Thursday, Huebsch said his caucus still is opposed to the hospital tax, calling it a ‘Medicaid scam’ the federal government will shut down in the future. Huebsch said he’s also concerned Doyle’s budget will skim off $120 million of the new Medicaid money for non-health spending. Huebsch said the WHA changed its position because the Doyle administration applied for and, about two weeks ago, received a change in the Medicaid funding formula, based on the hospital tax passing. Now, without the new money, hospitals with large numbers of Medicaid patients in Milwaukee stand to lose millions of dollars. [Huebsch] criticized Doyle for not making the formula change contingent on passage of the hospital tax.
Speaker Huebsch told the Wisconsin State Journal that if the Hospital Tax doesn’t pass, the state could lose up to $225 million because of the revised Doyle-requested calculation.
In my book, that’s akin to blackmail.
Interestingly, unlike the WHA, some hospitals haven’t changed their minds about the tax. Again, the LC Trib reports: Gundersen Lutheran CEO Dr. Jeff Thompson said Thursday their opposition hasn’t changed. “While I’m a big fan of getting our own tax dollars back to pay for our health care and relieve the burden on our businesses, this system has such a risk of not being sustainable, and not being sustained by all the federal rules,” he said. Franciscan Skemp spokesman Rick Thiesse said, “We are still reviewing the financial impact these new (WHA) conditions would have on Franciscan Skemp and our patients.”
And to top it off, the WHA acknowledges a tried and true Doyle fund transfer switcheroo (the $120M Speaker Huebsch mentioned above) – “…there are still drawbacks to the proposal, such as the possibility that the tax money could be diverted in the future to pay for other state costs that have nothing to do with health care.”
Just frosting on the cake of this particular budget scam.
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