Big Hospitals’ Obamacare Deal Betrays Seniors and the Poor
Chris Jacobs /
Newscom
A backroom deal made during the writing of Obamacare will harm seniors and the poor, according to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
During their closed-room dealings with the Obama Administration, the hospital industry’s lobbyists agreed to support Obamacare—provided that the law placed restrictions on physician-owned “specialty” hospitals, noted WSJ. These innovative specialty hospitals frequently have quality outcomes better than most traditional facilities, but no matter—the big hospital lobbyists wanted to eliminate a source of competition. So Obamacare prohibits new physician-owned hospitals from receiving Medicare payments — and prohibits most existing facilities from expanding if they wish to keep treating Medicare patients.
WSJ highlighted the actions specialty hospitals have been forced to take in response to these Obamacare restrictions:
Forest Park Medical Center in Dallas has stopped accepting Medicare patients, allowing it to escape the law’s restrictions entirely…. Rejecting Medicare ‘was a big leap, but we felt like the law gave us no choice,’ said J. Robert Wyatt, a Forest Park founder….
Other doctor-owned facilities are asking the federal government to let them duck the law’s restrictions altogether. Doctors Hospital at Renaissance near McAllen, Texas, is trying to get a waiver allowing it to expand as more than 53% of its payments come through the Medicaid federal-state insurance program for the poor.
In other words, because hospital lobbyists cut a backroom deal to support Obamacare, seniors and low-income patients have fewer health care options. Think that these examples of Americans losing access to care would prompt the hospital-industrial complex to reconsider its backroom deal? Not a chance:
Any effort to undo the expansion limits faces an uphill battle with Democrats, because the restrictions were a deal-breaker for hospitals when the White House sought their support for the law in 2009, industry lobbyists say.
Obamacare’s backroom deals (the “Louisiana Purchase,” the “Gator Aid,” and the “Cornhusker Kickback”) represented the worst in politics—well-heeled lobbyists seeking to obtain government largesse through pork-barrel spending and regulatory loopholes. The Wall Street Journal story reminds us how those backroom deals have real-world consequences when it comes to medical access—another example of how Obamacare has harmed patient care.