Ingram's December 2022

Regional hospitals are increasingly eating the cost of providing care for those who are uninsured, an in-kind charitable donation of perhaps half a billion dollars to the Kansas City region. Picking Up the Tab

by Dennis Boone

THE $99K CHALLENGE | Uncompensated care costs for the biggest hospital in the region came to more than $99,000 per staffed bed last year.

I n its most recent annual report, The University of Kansas Health Sys tem—home to the region’s largest medical center—noted $96.2 million in uncompensated care costs. If you av eraged that across the 970 staffed beds at The University of Kansas Hospital, you’d have a loss of $99,175 per bed for the year. The largest provider enterprise in the market, measured by staffed beds, is HCA Midwest Health, whose eight hospitals and other facilities ate $113.1 million in uncompensated care. That’s a staggering loss of $69,514 for each one of its 1,627 staffed beds. Two organizations, nearly $210 mil lion in what amounts to, in the most charitable assessment, a charitable gift to the region. But those two entities ac

count for only about one-third of the 7,243 hospital beds in the Kansas City area. Even if the remaining organiza tions posted losses at half the combin ed rate of the two biggest players, that would be an additional $224.6 million in care that produced no revenue. Those figures are one reason why KU Health’s CEO, Bob Page, has been beating the drum for the Kansas Leg islature to expand Medicaid coverage, something that lawmakers have stead fastly refused to do since passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. “With expanded Medicaid coverage and less uncompensated care, hospitals and clinics throughout the state will be able to focus critical resources on evolving patients needs,” he wrote to lawmakers in earlier efforts to secure

Medicaid funding. “It is especially im portant for smaller hospitals, as they will see greater impact when Medicaid payments increase at the same time uncompensated care decreases. It will significantly impact their operations.” Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly will take yet another crack at winning over a Republican-controlled statehouse in January, having seen the opposition diminish slightly in recent years, leav ing her just shy of the votes needed to push Kansas into the Medicaid-expan sion camp. Additional funding for hospitals is top of mind for health-care execu tives who last year had to weather a $60 million decrease in federal assist- ance for uncompensated care, dipping to $8.3 billion. That’s a far cry from the

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Ingrams.com

December 2022