Source: The Sum & Substance
A legislatively mandated report on hospital-system facility fees that was released Tuesday appears likely to spark a new round of debate on whether the state should limit the fees that opponents call costly and unclear and that hospitals say are vital to offsite operations.
The Hospital Facility Fee Report concluded that the fees, added for services in nonacute-care settings, drive up health-care costs by more than $50 million annually, are opaque and confusing and incentivize independent physicians to affiliate with larger hospital systems. However, the report also notes that a reduction in fee revenue could drastically cut the federal matching money that’s been used to expand Medicaid eligibility, and it noted several times that the task force could not collect adequate data for some conclusions.
Its release immediately brought calls from more than a half-dozen patient-advocacy groups for legislators to limit the fees and to take further steps to make health-care costs more transparent. But a hospital-industry representative on the steering committee that issued the report cautioned legislators against taking action based on the findings, saying in a dissenting letter that the committee offered insufficient evaluation of critical issues related to such fees.
