Turning back the clock on four decades of advances in health care for rural, underserved communities is no way to lessen state budget demands or protest a bad federal law. The unfortunate result of the budget approved this year by the North Carolina General Assembly, however — as well as the state’s refusal to accept Medicaid expansion dollars — is to slow and further threaten the Brody School of Medicine’s mission of improving health care in the east.
Administrators at ECU and its hospital partner, Vidant Health System, have spent much of this year lobbying state legislators to maintain revenue sources and debt-collection policies that help fund the medical school and the health care services it provides through clinical services. While their efforts won a positive measure of success, funding levels for Brody have continued the downward slide of recent years.
Rick Niswander, ECU vice chancellor for administration and finance, told The Daily Reflector last month that Brody’s clinical operations were established to both help the school support its mission, and to provide medical services to the underserved region.
Niswander said the funding formula is essential since the school was never intended to receive enough support from the state to fulfill its mission. In a story published Wednesday, ECU Chancellor Steve Ballard said that 20 years ago the state funded the medical school’s operations at nearly 40 percent.
“Today, it’s only 20 percent,” Ballard said, “so 80 cents of every dollar must come from other sources.”
The school’s medical practice, ECU Physicians, provides the main source of income, but legislative changes in the way the school can collect payments will cost the school about $2 million this year, according to Ballard.
That shortfall adds to more than $12 million lost by ECU physicians through lower reimbursements in the 2013-14 fiscal year. Administrators still do not know the extent of negative financial effects ECU, Brody and Vidant will face if lawmakers do not decide to accept Medicaid expansion when the Legislature reconvenes in January.
An analysis reported last week by the News & Observer in Raleigh projects that without Medicaid expansion in North Carolina, state taxpayers will spend more than $10 billion over the next eight years to provide health care services to residents of states that have accepted expansion.
Such a redistribution of wealth, perpetuated by our GOP-led state government, would be a disservice to all North Carolina taxpayers.
The Affordable Care Act is a deeply flawed law that our state leaders are right to oppose, but not to the avoidable detriment of the premier health care system the taxpayers of this state have spent decades and billions of dollars establishing.
