AHA Statement on Energy & Commerce Subcommittee Bill Markup

Stacey Hughes
Executive Vice President
American Hospital Association 

May 17, 2023
 

The AHA was pleased to see the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee take action today on issues of importance to hospitals, health systems, and their patients and communities. We look forward to continuing to work with lawmakers on transparency and other important issues.

However, the AHA is extremely disappointed and strongly disagrees with today’s efforts to implement site-neutral policies that both cut the Medicare program and reduce payments to hospitals and health systems. This is simply not the time to cut payments to hospitals, many of which are still under severe financial pressure coming out of the pandemic. Reducing Medicare hospital payments to prevent cuts to the Medicaid DSH program is inappropriate. While we support the subcommittee’s policy on Medicaid DSH, robbing Peter to pay Paul is not the way to achieve the objective and would add to the financial fragility of many hospitals. We look forward to working with Congress to eliminate these harmful cuts to hospitals that would further jeopardize access to care for patients and communities.

More information on the AHA’s views of the bills under consideration by the subcommittee today can be found HERE.

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Contact:    Colin Milligan, cmilligan@aha.org
                  Ben Teicher, bteicher@aha.org