Shameless

It’s just shameless.

The Colorado General Assembly seeks to increase fees on hospitals by almost $1 million per day rising to nearly $2 million per day in just three years.

The 33 small hospitals in the state start out paying $203,886 per year; the large ones will pay $14,129,302 per year. The total collected will be $336,411,944 in the first year. In the final year, 2012, full implementation of all the fees will raise $629,365,211!

And the hospitals are strongly in favor of this.

Why? Because the fee increase will be leveraged to collect additional federal funds of $209,743,600 in the first year and $508,827,172 in the final year of implementation and growing every year after that, forever.

Or maybe not. Did anyone notice that the federal government is broke? They are going to have a $1.8 Trillion deficit this year and even with the rosiest projections available, will have a $1 Trillion deficit every year for the next ten years. And that’s rosy? The real answer is that they are broke and at some point this fantasy of having Uncle Obama pay for everything will end.

And then what?

Then maybe, just maybe, we’ll go back to funding only those things that government absolutely has to fund.

Back to the hospital fee and bait and switch. The hospitals pay in one dollar and they get back one dollar and fifty eight cents. Easy to see why the hospitals think it is a good idea. They’ll get the money in increased rates paid to them and in a significant increase in the number of Medicaid patients, about 158,000 total additional people when fully implemented.

It amounts to a $1 billion a year expansion into socialized medicine.
It’s HB09-1293 and it is unconscionable.