About the program
This health care program allows nonpublic hospitals to contribute to a fund that helps recapture uncompensated expenses. The fund can help cover costs from caring for Medicaid, low-income or uninsured patients.
“This ... program is central to these hospitals’ financial stability,” Adelanto HealthCare Ventures representative Robin Oldom said at the Sept. 23 meeting.
How it works
When hospitals treat uninsured patients or those covered by Medicaid, they take a financial loss, Oldom said. One way hospitals can make up for the loss is to secure federal matching funds.
To do this, hospitals in the county make payments to the local provider participation fund, or LPPF. This payment is calculated as a percentage of each hospital's net patient revenue, and the hospitals are not allowed to add this payment on a patient's bill, according to state documents.
Williamson County sends the money from the LPPF to the state, which uses the funds to pay the nonfederal share to receive matching funds from the federal Medicaid program.
The pool of money, which includes the hospital’s payments and the federal matching funds, is returned back to the hospitals as Medicaid supplemental payments.
“The LPPF gives [hospitals] an avenue to access those federal funds,” Oldom said. “It helps that the hospitals pool their money together, which they use as the state's share that comes back matched ... a little bit better than a two-to-one match.”
What happened
Commissioners voted to keep the payment rate at 6%, the same rate as the previous year.
This is the eighth year hospitals have worked with the county for the LPPF, Oldom said, which has helped bring over $540 million of funding to hospitals in the county.
“These funds are invaluable to us to be able to continue to care for the most vulnerable of the population,” Bill Galinsky, a Baylor Scott & White Health representative, said at the Sept. 23 meeting.
