Required to report annually to Congress on the state of the Medicaid program, members of the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission reviewed drafts of their proposed March report to Congress at the agency’s January meeting in Washington, D.C.

In its draft report MACPAC addresses the Medicaid disproportionate share hospital payment program (Medicaid DSH), including DSH allotments, their relationship to the number of uninsured people, the amount and sources of hospital uncompensated care costs, and the impact of Medicaid DSH on hospitals that provide especially large amounts of uncompensated care while also providing essential community services.

The draft MACPAC report addresses:

• the decline in the number of uninsured Americans;
• the Medicaid DSH cuts scheduled to begin in federal FY 2018; and
• the possibility of changing how Medicaid DSH payments are targeted to DSH-eligible hospitals.

All private safety-net hospitals receive Medicaid DSH payments and those payments are very important to them because they serve so many more uninsured patients than the typical community hospital.

See a draft of the chapter of the MACPAC report on Medicaid DSH here, on the MACPAC web site.