While the law concerns health insurance, responsibility for its
implementation will also fall to hospitals. The reform will have
far-reaching impacts on everything from health providers to
billing.
A major component of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a mandated
expansion of Medicaid. The law also prescribed cuts to Medicaid
Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments, which subsidize
hospitals with high levels of uncompensated care. For states that
have opted out of Medicaid expansion, Medicaid reimbursements
will not make up for lost DSH payments. However, DSH cuts may
also create additional financial challenges for these hospitals
in opt-in states if Medicaid expansion does not reduce overall
uncompensated care.
In his keynote presentation, Mitchell Katz talks about the
challenges of providing health care to poor and uninsured
populations, and the changes required of county hospitals by the
Affordable Care Act.
Katz is the director of Los Angeles County Department of Health
Services, which serves more than ten million residents, about one
million of whom have no medical insurance.
In this presentation, Peter Cunningham discusses his research on
how the Affordable Care Act might affect how safety net hospitals
that primarily serve poor populations care for their patients.
Cunningham is a Senior Fellow and Director of Quantitative
Research at the Center for Studying Health System Change.
In this presentation, Ian Hill discusses how health care
providers will meet the new need created by the Affordable Care
Act, and how states are planning to cope with the higher demand
for care. Hill is a research fellow with the Urban Institute.
In this panel discussion, moderator Joy Melnikow and panelists
Ron Chapman, Neal Kohatsu, Robin Affrime and Kris Srinivasan
consider how academic research might contribute to successful
implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
In this April 2013 seminar, Visiting Scholar Janet Shim
discusses her ongoing sociological examination of epidemiology,
specifically how epidemiologists conceptualize and use race,
socioeconomic status, and sex/gender in their work, and how lay
people think about the effects of such social differences on
their health.
