AHA report shows Medicare X plan could cost health care providers $800 billion over the next decade. | Pixabay/Sasin Tipchai
AHA report shows Medicare X plan could cost health care providers $800 billion over the next decade. | Pixabay/Sasin Tipchai
The Illinois Republican Party has alleged that Medicare changes advocated by Betsy Londrigan, Democratic candidate for Illinois’ 13th Congressional District, would be catastrophic to health care, yet she won’t answer questions about it.
Londrigan has proposed an $800 billion cut to hospital funding, a release issued on the Illinois Republican Party website said.
“Betsy Londrigan refuses to answer questions about her radical plan to cut hospital funding by $800 billion because she knows her plan will force local front-line health care workers like nurses out of a job,"Joe Hackler, Illinois Republican Party spokesperson, said in the release. “In a district where major regional hospitals employ thousands of Illinoisans, not only does the Londrigan-backed funding cuts to local hospitals put public health at risk, they would also devastate our local economies.”
The American Hospital Association collaborated with the Federation of American Hospitals on an analysis of the Medicare X plan. The report concluded that while Medicare X would create a modest drop in the number of Americans who are uninsured, the full implementation of the plan's coverage framework would help to insure approximately 9.1 million people.
The summary also revealed the potential for the plan to cost hospitals approximately $800 billion over the course of a decade. While Medicare X would not only cause hospital revenues to drop, it would do so while demands for services continue to grow. This extra burden on providers would be in addition to the losses they are already dealing with after $200 billion in overall cuts to Medicare, the report said.
The release also cited a report by Rich Miller of Capitol Fax.“This congressional district has a huge number of major regional hospitals, likely the most in Illinois and perhaps one of the most in the country," Miller said in the release. "Those hospitals are significant local employers and they also drive technological development. Not to mention that hospitals have been especially hard-hit during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
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