This time she's not doing something awful.
Gov. Jan Brewer's decision to harangue her Republican legislature to accept Medicaid expansion is paying off for the whole state of Arizona, but especially its hospitals. A new report from the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association says that uncompensated care has been reduced 31 percent in the last four months compared to the same period last year.
During that period, enrollment in the state’s Medicaid program swelled. Enrollment was encouraged communitywide as part of an effort to meet a federal requirement through President Obama’s Affordable Care Act that all Americans, with certain exceptions, have health insurance this year.
The Arizona hospital report shows the average operating margin of Arizona hospitals has gone up from 4 percent in 2013 to the current rate of 5.2 percent — a signal to some health experts that the Affordable Care Act will be a net positive for hospitals’ bottom lines. […]
Nearly one in every four residents in Arizona is now covered by Medicaid, which in Arizona is known as the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS).
State data show the number of Pima County residents added to the AHCCCS rolls has jumped 21 percent since last year. The latest numbers show 239,828 Pima County residents are enrolled in AHCCCS. Enrollment is 1.55 million statewide.
Uncompensated care is both charity care provided by hospitals and bad debts they have to write off, and in Arizona it spiked after the state decided to drop the childless adult population from Medicaid in July 2011. The numbers of childless adults in Medicaid has rebounded 247 percent since the decision to expand Medicaid and allow them back in, which obviously makes a big difference in the amount of uncompensated care hospitals are providing. One, Tucson Medical Center, reports a 45-percent drop.
That's money that the state doesn't have to try to come up with to reimburse hospitals to help keep them afloat. The business school at Arizona State University estimated that the expansion would bring more than 15,000 jobs to the state by 2016, increase state revenues by over $2.8 billion in the next three years and increase personal disposable income by more than $1.6 billion. The decline in uncompensated care is just a drop in the bucket for what Medicaid expansion is likely to do for Arizona.