(Spirit Lake)– Rural hospitals are still trying to gauge potential impacts of the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed earlier this summer in Congress. Jason Harrington, President and CEO of Lakes Regional Healthcare, says the concerns are centered around revisions and reductions to Medicare and Medicaid and the potential financial impacts on healthcare facilities…
“The One Big Beautiful Bill has some implications for healthcare in it and it’s just an example of those things that we have to respond to as much as we’d like to be proactive to those things. Sometimes it’s just us responding to something that’s happened in Congress or happened at the state Legislature and so that will be true in this case as well and we’ll respond to it strongly. You know our mission is to continue to increase access to services to people in our community and we’ll continue to do that.”
Harrington says trying to predict the extent of those at this point is still very difficult to do…
“I’ve talked with or worked with about three different consultants and the implications for that bill for healthcare are really being phased in over about a 10 year period and when the start of that 10 year period is a little unknown. I think the other piece of that is that part of that bill included 50 billion dollars for rural healthcare organizations over a five year period, but each individual state has to apply for those funds and then how each of those states distributes those funds is a little bit unclear. So I would have to give you a really, really broad range which the impact of that could be anywhere from, you know, over that 10 year period, a cut of two million dollars a year starting in year three, which would be a significant number for us. And those are very rough estimates, Steve, so they could look different but I think the industry is still sorting through all of those.”
Harrington made his comments in a recent interview with KUOO news.
