What’s happening: On March 6, CHA sent a letter to the Office of Health Care Affordability (OHCA) calling attention to the office’s flawed, prejudicial approach to creating a hospital sector.
What else to know: Over the coming weeks, hospitals must engage at every opportunity to ensure the OHCA board understands the devastating impact its actions will have on patient care. See CHA’s March 13 alert for details.
CHA’s letter outlined the basic responsibilities OHCA failed to complete prior to proposing a hospital sector, including:
- Analyzing even a single year of comprehensive spending data
- Looking at available data for any other potential sector
- Determining how hospital spending growth will be measured
- Assessing the reasonableness of the statewide spending target
Despite these shortcomings, OHCA is poised to adopt a sector definition and commensurate lower target more than three years ahead of the schedule laid out in statute — a decision that “prejudicially targets a single set of providers” and “will destabilize equitable access to high-quality hospital care.”
