Does State Budget Pressure Matter For Uncompensated Care Spending In Hospitals? Findings From Texas And California

Objective This study examined the impact of state budget cuts on uncompensated care at general acute care hospital organizations. This study capitalized on the variations in the states of Texas and California to form a natural experiment testing the joint impact of budget cut status on uncompensated care costs, as well as specific charity care costs and bad debt expenses from indigent patients. Methodology Budget cuts in the state of Texas occurred in the year 2004. Information was obtained from the Texas Department of Health and the California Department of Health Services regarding financial characteristics of hospitals and from the American Hospital Directory annual survey regarding organizational characteristics of hospitals. We created three dependent variables: RUC (the ratio of total uncompensated care costs to gross patient revenue), RCC (the ratio of charity care to total patient revenue) and RBD (the ratio of bad debt expenses to gross patient revenue). Using a two-period panel data set and individual hospital fixed effects, we captured hospital uncompensated care spending that could also have influenced budget cut status. Additionally, the impact of the state budget cut status on hospitals' uncompensated care spending, charity care spending and bad debt expenses was also estimated using the similar methodology. Population studied In this study, we included 416 (in Texas) and 352 (in California) public, not-for-profit (NFP) and for-profit (FP) hospitals that completed the annual survey during the study period 20022005. Findings For the state of Texas, results from the fixed effect model confirmed that the year 2005 was directly related to increased RUC and RCC. The coefficients of 2005 were significantly and positively associated with RUC (0.43, p?更多