At NRHA’s Policy Institute (PI) last week in Washington, DC, Scott Goodspeed, iVantage Principal gave a report on the impact of sequestration on rural hospitals nationwide. It appears that one of the possible offsets to pay for a one-year extension of the nation’s debt limit, which is set to expire soon, is to continue sequestration of government funds, including Medicare, until 2024.
Continued sequestration is a dangerous prescription for rural health especially as the federal government considers other ideas to cut the budget deficit. Remember the idea to remove certification of CAH’s that are less than 10 miles from another hospital? Here is a story from west Texas on “Losing Hospitals” that documents what would happen if this bad idea ever became a reality.
Finally, researcher Jan Probst from the South Carolina Rural Health Research Center in Columbia, SC wrote a fantastic response in Health Affairs to Jeffrey Stensland’s (employed by MedPAC) November, 2013 article on workforce issues in rural America. Probst provides a compelling argument for the continuation of payment programs for rural providers.