The Alliance of Safety-Net Hospitals has established its policy priorities for 2023 in a new advocacy agenda.

In the coming year ASH will work to advance its own new proposal for a better approach to fostering more equitable access to health care.  This new approach, outlined in ASH’s “Proposal to Advance Health Equity,” takes advantage of the availability of new, more granular data – at the zip code level – to pinpoint disadvantaged communities with the greatest health care needs and challenging social determinants of health and direct new, supplemental Medicare and Medicaid payments to providers that serve especially high proportions of the residents of those specific areas.  These would be new payments, over and above the supplemental payments such providers currently receive.  In this manner, these federal resources would be much more finely targeted to the communities facing the greatest challenges rather than being administered so broadly to so many recipients that they fail to achieve their policy objectives.  Learn more from ASH’s “Proposal to Advance Health Equity.”

ASH’s other 2023 policy priorities will be:

• Encouraging lawmakers to delay implementation of a major cut in Medicaid disproportionate share payments (Medicaid DSH) mandated by the Affordable Care Act that are now scheduled to take effect in 2024.
• Ensuring that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services compensates 340B prescription drug discount program-eligible hospitals for the payment shortfalls they have suffered since 2018, when CMS reduced payments in a manner that federal courts have now ruled to be illegal.
• Working with policy-makers to ensure that the federal approach to implementing the No Surprises Act treats hospitals more fairly.
• Reminding policy-makers that it is essential that amid the increased focus on addressing behavioral health and substance use challenges they need to pay special attention to the patients community safety-net hospitals serve whose behavioral health problems so often can be traced to inequitable access to care and social determinants of health.
• Protecting government payments to community safety-net hospitals, especially amid possible efforts by some to cut such payments to reduce the federal deficit or to underwrite spending for other purposes.
• Working with Congress and the administration to ensure that they understand the scope of the current health care workforce shortage and its implications for the health and well-being of individuals who require hospitalization and the providers who care for them.

Learn more about how ASH will work on behalf of community safety-net hospitals from its 2023 advocacy agenda.