More Obamacare "Social justice": cutting subsidies for charity medical care

Dr John Goodman's website explains what is happening. See here. Less money will be paid by the government to hospitals that provide medical care to indigent patients.

A number of well known hospitals ( e.g. Parkland in Dallas,Grady in Atlanta, etc) provide much medical care to indigent patients. The federal government through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid have provided significant subsidies under a program referred to disproportionate share payments.

One of the mechanisms devised to fund the health care transformation known as ACA is to make significant cuts in this program.

Quoting from a recent  ( see here) NYT article:

“We were so thrilled when the law passed, but it has backfired,” said Lindsay Caulfield, senior vice president for planning and marketing at Grady Health in Atlanta, the largest safety-net hospital in Georgia.
 
 As Obamacare unfolds we are seeing more than a little backfiring.

 And this quote from my favorite Louisiana economist, Dr. Don Boudreaux writing in his blog  " Cafe Hayek"

" In the 18th century, Adam Smith launched the discipline of economics by explaining that intentions are not results, and that the complexity of a real-world economy nearly always overwhelms and confounds the hubris-intoxicated “man of system” who aims to improve matters through government intervention."

The most generous interpretation of the comments from spokespeople from AMA and ACP when they lauded ACA as a fountainhead of social justice  is that they were enamored with the purported intentions of ACA and naively believed that intentions equaled results.   

The cuts in subsidies for safety-net hospitals like Memorial — those that deliver a significant amount of care to poor, uninsured or otherwise vulnerable patients — are set to total at least $18 billion through 2020.  The government has projected that as much as $22 billion more in Medicare subsidies could be cut by 2019, depending partly on the change in the numbers of uninsured nationally. - See more at: http://healthblog.ncpa.org/tattering-the-safety-net/#sthash.O6he8bDl.dpufThe cuts in subsidies for safety-net hospitals like Memorial — those that deliver a significant amount of care to poor, uninsured or otherwise vulnerable patients — are set to total at least $18 billion through 2020.  The government has projected that as much as $22 billion more in Medicare subsidies could be cut by 2019, depending partly on the change in the numbers of uninsured nationally. - See more at: http://healthblog.ncpa.org/tattering-the-safety-net/#sthash.O6he8bDl.dpufThe cuts in subsidies for safety-net hospitals like Memorial — those that deliver a significant amount of care to poor, uninsured or otherwise vulnerable patients — are set to total at least $18 billion through 2020.  The government has projected that as much as $22 billion more in Medicare subsidies could be cut by 2019, depending partly on the change in the numbers of uninsured nationally. - See more at: http://healthblog.ncpa.org/tattering-the-safety-net/#sthash.O6he8bDl.dpufThe cuts in subsidies for safety-net hospitals like Memorial — those that deliver a significant amount of care to poor, uninsured or otherwise vulnerable patients — are set to total at least $18 billion through 2020.  The government has projected that as much as $22 billion more in Medicare subsidies could be cut by 2019, depending partly on the change in the numbers of uninsured nationally. - See more at: http://healthblog.ncpa.org/tattering-the-safety-net/#sthash.O6he8bDl.dpuf