Christopher Jacobs writes for the Federalist about another example of media malfeasance.
Congress may have spent most of the last few weeks out of session. But despite lawmakers decamping from Washington for their home districts, rest assured that the swamp remains alive and well.
A recent story in Politico provides yet another example of how K Street lobbying works — with the former serving as the free publicity arm of the latter. The publication ran a story about hospitals purportedly incurring large losses without including any explanation of or justification for its claims. If there’s a more obvious way to shill for the organizations potentially paying thousands of dollars for subscriptions to one’s publication, I have yet to see it.
At issue in the article: two Medicaid-related provisions of last year’s budget reconciliation bill. The first one involves provider taxes, which most states assess on various groups of medical practitioners (including hospitals) as a fancy way of attracting additional federal matching dollars from Washington. The second involves state-directed payments, supplemental payments that Medicaid programs make — often to hospitals, and often with the state share of the payments financed via provider taxes or similar budgetary gimmicks designed to shift funding from the states to Washington.
The Politico article predicts catastrophe for hospitals. …
… It sounds frightening — which is in many respects the point. Because the article itself includes precious little evidence of the problem.
Does Politico ever explain exactly what in the proposed rules would inflict the supposed “extra” $681 billion in losses on hospitals through 2035? Nope. For that matter, did the reporters in question ever actually read the rules? Given one of the two reporters’ history of not paying attention to a report, and then re-writing the story to cover his tracks after I pointed out the inaccuracies rooted in that ignorance, I highly doubt it.
