Children’s hospitals have spent the past year bracing for the fallout from roughly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts included in a sweeping spending bill that President Donald Trump signed into law last year.
Now the federal government has proposed additional restrictions on Medicaid funding, and children’s hospitals worry the financial harm to pediatric healthcare could be even worse than expected.
Children’s hospitals in Texas and nationwide are asking the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to scale back a proposed rule that would dictate how states will implement cuts to a key source of Medicaid funding, known as state-directed payments. Any changes will have an outsized impact on children’s hospitals because more than half of their patients are covered by Medicaid.