Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act Of 2009

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, one longstanding priority of mine has been to improve Medicare payments for hospitals known as tweeners. They tend to have too many beds, so they can't qualify as critical access hospitals, but they do not have sufficient volume to operate viably under Medicare's prospective payment systems. There are a number of these tweener hospitals in Iowa.

Working closely with the Iowa Hospital Association and individual Iowa hospitals over the years, I introduced, last Congress, the Rural Hospital Assistance Act of 2008, S. 3300, which would improve the low-volume adjustment for hospitals under Medicare's hospital inpatient prospective payment system. This improvement would enable tweener hospitals to benefit from this adjustment.

In fact, the low volume adjustment provision in the Finance Committee's health reform bill, S. 1796, and the Reid substitute to H.R. 3590 is the language that I crafted. This language was crafted with the intention of benefiting all Iowa tweener hospitals. I was assured by the Iowa Hospital Association that this language would do so, and they supported it.

Unfortunately, after the Finance Committee markup of S. 1796, I learned from the Iowa Hospital Association that the language they originally supported would not benefit all Iowa tweener hospitals. I was informed that several Iowa tweener hospitals had Medicare discharges in excess of the maximum in the provision, which was 1,500.

In an attempt to make sure that all Iowa tweener hospitals benefit from this provision, I filed an amendment that would increase the maximum number of Medicare discharges from 1,500 to 1,600. This amendment was also offset. My staff was successful in working with the majority staff to include my amendment in the manager's amendment to the Reid substitute.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source