Report: Obamacare will hurt Arkansas hospitals

By Nic Horton | The Arkansas Project

The Advance Arkansas Institute has released a new report about the impact of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion on Arkansas hospitals. In short, Obamacare-Medicaid expansion is a loser for hospitals all the way around.

Here are some of the key findings of the report:

• The problem of hospitals’ uncompensated care is driven primarily by bad debt, which the private option does not address;

• The problem of hospital bad debt, and uncompensated care generally, is likely overstated by hospitals’ use of “charge basis” accounting;

• The private option will weaken hospital balance sheets by increasing both their bad debt and their undercompensated Medicaid costs;

• The private option will increase both the costs and the burdens in already-strained Arkansas hospital emergency rooms;

• The Affordable Care Act’s scheduled Medicaid cuts which supposedly justified the private option – like the Affordable Care Act’s scheduled employer mandate – never happened.

at The Arkansas Project.

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