County nursing homes across the state are expected to incur Medicaid cuts that add up to over $3 million dollars this year.
And county administrators are reeling over the news as they attempt to find ways to make up fo the loss in revenue and continue to serve some of the poorest seniors in the state.
NHPR’s Dianne Finch has more.
Department of Health and Human Services officials have said that they will be reducing rates they pay to nursing homes beginning next month to make up for a $900,000 deficit.
In total, those Medicaid cuts add up to $3.7 million including federal, state and county matching contributions.
Jonathan McCosh, with HHS’s bureau of elderly and adult services, says that there are several reasons for the payment reductions.
First, he says, the latest calculations show that nursing home patient contributions – for unknown reasons – had fallen by about $1.4 million this year.
In addition, he said that the state paid more of last year’s bills out of this year’s budget than expected.
And finally, he says that the state overpaid counties for nursing home services during the first part of the current fiscal year.
McCosh: “The assumptions we used to determine the august 2007 rates were in some cases too generous. So essentially we paid out more for August rates than we should have and so therefore we have to make the February rates a little lower in order to meet overall budget for the year.”
Representative Fred King from Colebrook says that he is very concerned for Coos County citizens because they can’t afford another property tax increase to make up for the losses.
He says average wages are lower in Coos than the state average, and the economy is al ready strained.
KING: “We’ve lost jobs and we’ve lost income for our residents and we continue to raise their taxes for programs that are essential. We have a high percentage of elderly in our population because as the mills closed over the years the young people have left town - the older people stayed.
So Medicaid costs per capita are much higher in Coos County and we have less money to support that.”
Coos County Administrator Suzanne Collins agrees.
And she says that property taxes will have to rise by as much as 23% - as a result of several Medicaid-related cuts.
“We have about 155 of our residents that are on Medicaid. Our rates for one of our nursing homes went down $9.60 a day and the other rate for the other nursing home went down $9.46 cents a day. The reduction in rates will cost Coos County over $250,000 dollars.”
Still, HHS’s McCosh added that those two nursing homes in COOS were expected to get reductions anyway – not only because of the shortfall.
He says that by law, the state has to recalculate reimbursement rates to nursing homes every six months.
And in the Coos case, both nursing homes were slated to get less money per resident this year because the patient population needs fewer services than a year earlier.
“If a nursing home has patients in it residents in it that are sicker they get more money. If they have residents that don’t need the same amount of direct care they would get less money. That’s what happened in both of these facilities.”
McCosh doesn’t expect that the budget shortfall will affect Coos County more than it was already expecting, but he acknowledged that the numbers aren’t yet final.
Regardless of the outcome, Representative King says that he hopes the legislature will get better at funding programs that they approve.
For NHPR News, I’m Dianne Finch
