Obama Assault On Nursing Homes, Physicians, Hospitals

An announcement by the Obama Administration, last week, led to the collapse of stocks of nursing home operators and threats of nursing home closures across the country, on top of those that are already occurring in states such as Illinois because of low to non-existent Medicaid reimbursements. Last Friday, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced an 11.1 percent reduction in what it will pay for Medicare services provided to patients in nursing homes. The ostensible reason for the $3.87 billion reduction is to "correct flaws," in the words of the Wall Street Journal, in the agency's reimbursement rates. CMS claimed that some operators took advantage of a loophole in a rates change last year to overcharge the agency for the services they were providing. While it's almost certainly the case that some for-profit operators did, indeed, overcharge the government, CMS's response was to cut reimbursement rates to all nursing homes. Under Obamacare, entire strata of health care provision are under assault. The big nursing home operators saw their stocks drop as much as 30 percent, after Friday's announcement, but they can shop for private-pay patients. It's the small, local operators, especially in rural areas that will be hit the hardest, the same ones that are already suffering from low Medicaid reimbursement rates, meaning that those senior citizens who have little to no assets, are the ones most likely to end up on the streets without any care at all.

And this is happening before the big cuts from the fascist debt deal have even been decided upon, yet. Medicare and Medicaid are both supposed to be exempt from the first round of Congressional budget cuts, but they're far game for the so-called Super Committee, and even if the committee can't agree on cuts, the automatic cuts that will then take place will still hit Medicare payments to providers. "Choices will have to be made by Nov. 23," health industry consultant Robert Laszewski told National Public Radio, yesterday. "And we're going to see political blood on the floor like we've never seen before." He might've added that there will be real blood flowing from the cuts to Medicare and Medicaid that almost certainly will result. Hospitals and long term care facilities will no longer be able to accept medicare patients. Doctors who take care of medicare patients will see a 29.5 percent pay cut on Jan.1, 2012, unless Congress acts to prevent it. In these budget cutting environment, that's not likely. "It will make the Medicare program not reliable and physicians will have to make really excruciating choices whether they can... still see the number of Medicare patients they have been seeing," Cecil Wilson, immeidate past president of the AMA told NPR. Benficiaries and benefits are supposed to be exempt from automatic cuts, but what the heck good is having Medicare benefits if there's no doctor that'll see you or no hospital to go to?