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“If you don’t expand Medicaid and you eliminate the DSH funding, you have the ability to significantly impact hospitals’ financials,” said Missouri Hospital Association spokesman Dave Dillon, who was not at the oversight committee meeting. “It’s extremely problematic.”
Nearly every hospital in the state receives DSH payments, and they stand to get a combined $784 million in DSH payments under the 2013 budget.
“Losing this money would be a big deal for rural hospitals,” said oversight committee chair Dr. Corinne Walentik, a professor of pediatrics in the Division of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at St. Louis University.
Walentik said she worries that as many as 40 to 50 percent of rural hospitals could close if those payments cease with no backup.
“It would probably cost the state more to not take (the Medicaid expansion),” she said. She compared the expansion to a stimulus program that will help rural communities save thousands of jobs that would be lost if hospitals are forced to shutter because of the financial constraints.
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