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Show BY RICK KINNERSLEY President Medicaid - On The Verge Of Failure It now seems apparent that the experimentation ex-perimentation of the U.S. Government in health care has created a crisis which has providers, insurers and consumers con-sumers scrambling to recover from. Utah, and many other states, have been administering Medicaid health care funds for the financially disabled for a decade and a half, but the requirements re-quirements of government are outstripping out-stripping the funding. Within the forseeable future some hard decisions about the amount and kind of health care government will pay for are going to have to be made or our health care system itself, will go bankrupt. A good example of this dilemma is the State of Alabama. According to , Congressman Richard C. Shelby, "...the Medicaid program is on the verge of bankruptcy. Just 89 the state legislature was about tq agree on a new budget for fiscal year 1981 which.. .would funnel enough money into the program to assure health services ser-vices for all eligible persons, the (Carter) administration proposed the elimination of State Revenue Sharing as a step toward balancing the Federal Budget..." This, says Rep. Shelby (D-Ala.) pulled one of the necessary supports right out of Alabama's Medicaid plan. In Utah similar problems have developed. Governor Matheson identified iden-tified a shortfall of funds in his projected pro-jected '79 budget and imposed a four percent across-the-board cut in all budgets, including Medicaid. The squeal from providers and planners of health care for the poor could be heard throughout the state, and while the suppliers suggested tightening-up Medicaid qualifications, the government govern-ment insisted on the same level of health care with the providers giving more of it away. Congressman Shelby summed the problem up nicely in a Congressional Record statement on April 2nd when he said, "all potential for ingenuity at the State level has been robbed by the . regulations written in -the Washington offices of HEW, far removed from the realities of day-to-day provision of services. ser-vices. Cost savings through greater provider participations, reorientation of specific delivery systems to better fit local needs, and greater recipient participation - all of these are precluded preclud-ed by the tight regulatory network surrounding the Medicaid system." Medical services demanded by government should be fully funded. Under the current arrangement every hospital patient is being taxed twice to pay for health care of his less fortunate for-tunate fellow citizens. He's taxed first through his income to fund the Medicaid program. Then he's taxed at ' the hospital with an "overhead tax" the facility must impose in order to pay for government required services given to Medicaid patients which government won't pay for. This is not good business and such practices will eventually breakdown in the denial of service or the bankruptcy of health suppliers. f J UTAH HOSPITAL ASSOCIATION I-"! |