Legislative session starts today – Major health care issues on the agenda – action required – communicate with your legislators – keep your board informed. There will be a number of major health care issues that will be dealt with during the session. They include:
- Tax credit increase
- Effort will be made to increase it to $100 million cap – which will be excellent for rural hospitals
- Effort will be made:
- to clarify eligibility list based on better transparency on eligibility formulas
- Clarify issues such as non-designated funds and administrative rules improvement
- Surprise medical billing
- A notoriously difficult issue to deal with but legislature is dedicated to addressing it through to a completion
- CON
- Based on findings and recommendations for Rural Development Council major issues that may be dealt with include
- Ambulatory Surgery Centers
- CTCA
- Capital thresholds
- All indications are that rural hospitals will have protection built in to protect rural hospitals
- CON may be eliminated for Region 3, for the approximately five countries in Atlanta, so as to let the large hospitals fight it out among themselves
- Based on findings and recommendations for Rural Development Council major issues that may be dealt with include
- Transparency
- The House RDC stressed the need for full transparency on basically all operational data for a not-for-profit hospital. For profits already have reporting requirements through IRS. This emphasis is a product of a number of compliance violations and issues and problems for transparency and open records.
- This will be a major part of the Hospital Board training program as well other major data postings from within the hospital structure
- This may cause a number of hospital board members to rethink whether they want to serve on a hospital board after they learn what their liabilities really are.
There is no doubt that this will be a major health care session and especially a rural health care session with many scenarios to play out.