The Texas Tribune, a non-profit public media organization, published a story about nursing facilities in Texas facing Medicaid rate cuts.
The article mentions a story we blogged about last month. To deal with a potential budget shortfall, Governor Rick Perry, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, and House Speaker Joe Straus asked HHSC to reduce Medicaid spending by five percent. HHSC Commissioner Tom Suehs offered a list of reductions worth $304 million.
The Texas Tribune notes that last month’s proposed reductions would mean a one percent decrease for nursing care and a two percent cut for long term care, hospice, and similar providers.
“We can’t afford to serve as many people as we have historically,” said Baptist Memorial Executive Director Patrick Crump. “We can’t afford to take another cut from where we are right now and continue to provide to the same number of people at the same level.”
As Medicaid providers are underfunded now, more cuts likely would impact providers’ ability to hire or maintain current levels of staffing. Those seemingly small cuts would result in fewer available beds and a loss of as much as $200,000 annually for some facilities.
Tim Graves, president and CEO of the Texas Health Care Association in Austin, wrote a letter to the editor of the Dallas Morning News about the impact of the cuts. “We believe that before we engage in discussions about cutting Texas seniors’ key Medicaid-financed programs, we must absolutely look first at the fact facilities are already dealing with a state and federal funding environment that squeezes their collective ability to recruit and retain high-quality direct-care staff.”
Texas was ranked fourth nationally for Medicaid underfunding in 2009, according to the American Health Care Association.
