Williamson County commissioners establish new rate structure for healthcare provider fund

The Williamson County Healthcare Provider Participation Program will now have two separate rates that contribute to a dedicated bank account, following approval from the Commissioners Court on Oct. 27.

What happened

Following negotiations between the Texas Health and Human Services Commission and the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the assessment calculation was updated from the single-rate models.

Rather than the traditional one-rate structure, the program will now draw from a rate based on net patient revenue from inpatient hospital services and another from outpatient hospital services.

What it means

The healthcare program subsidizes the cost of treating patients without insurance or those covered by Medicaid through mandatory assessments collected from local private hospitals, such as Ascension Seton and Baylor Scott & White.

That money collected from private hospitals is then sent through state-administered programs and matched with federal funds, to be redistributed to the participating local hospitals through the local provider participation fund, or LPPF.

"This is an assessment that is levied on those hospitals in that way that saves the county and everyone within it money by being able to serve the uninsured and the most vulnerable in your county," hospital consultant Justin Flores said at the meeting.

Additionally, the county authorized the creation of a dedicated LPPF bank account to manage the mandatory hospital payments.