Thursday, April 28, 2011

Another Doyle Screwing: This Time, the Hospitals

Jim Doyle, now an attorney with a prominent Milwaukee firm, has a legacy which is simply awful. Falling-down freeway bridges, (2 of them--the Hoan, too); a $3Bn++ deficit, tax increases, and now (!!) .........

...The state implemented the hospital tax to leverage additional federal dollars for Medicaid programs. Money collected by the tax is matched with federal funds to increase Medicaid payments to hospitals and fund other state Medicaid programs.

In 2010, the tax generated $1.62 for each dollar raised by the tax, which was down from the $1.73 that was generated in 2009.

Because of the tax, hospitals received a $32 million increase in Medicaid payments compared with 2009, but they also paid $43 million more for the hospital tax.

....and where, dear sucker, do you think that $11 million will come from?

2 comments:

Headless Blogger said...

Wrong headline. Hospitals don't pay taxes, their patients do.

neomom said...

Anyone with half a brain understood at the time that the entire premise of increasing taxes on hospitals to make medical care less expensive was, um... lets just call it fuzzy math to be nice. Not to mention that those extra Medicaid funds from the Feds are also from taxes...

This seems an appropriate time to recycle a few cliches regarding "free" money:

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is

and

There is no such thing as a free lunch.