Bipartisan bill seeks to alter Obamacare

[Geee]

Washington Times:

A Republican and a Democrat teamed up Wednesday to announce a bill to dissolve part of President Obama’s health care law that critics say skews some of the benefits to hospitals in Massachusetts, at the expense of other states.

The legislation was written by Sens. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, and Claire McCaskill, Missouri Democrat. It’s the first in what is expected to be a host of bills designed to tweak rather than repeal the health care law, which the Supreme Court upheld last year and which voters have given Mr. Obama a chance to see into fruition.

This bill would eliminate a money-shifting “gimmick” that resulted from the use of rural hospitals as the wage floor for Medicare reimbursements — a system that went askew because the Bay State’s benchmark hospital happens to be on Nantucket, the well-to-do island off the Atlantic Coast.

Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, any state’s urban hospitals have to be reimbursed under Medicare for wages paid to doctors and staff at a level that is at least as much as in rural hospitals. Because the only hospital classified as “rural” in Massachusetts is located on the wealthy island, wage reimbursement rates are inflated for the state’s 81 other hospitals and would drain resources from the other states, Ms. McCaskill and Mr. Coburn said.