How PPACA is Shredding the Poor's Safety Net

This is from John Goodman writing at the National Center for Policy Analysis:

Here is irony: the people who talk the most about the need for a social safety net (including the president himself!) are cheerleaders for a health reform that is going to shred it. 

How is that happening? By means of the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare).
Through the Medicare and Medicaid programs, the federal government provides billions of dollars in subsides every year to hospitals that see a disproportionate number of patients who are poor and uninsured or who are on Medicaid. In both cases the result is the same: hospital revenues fall well short of the cost of care they dispense. 

The shortfall is what people in the health policy world call “uncompensated care” and the payments are referred to as “disproportionate share” money. 

Readers can be forgiven if they are naturally suspicious of hospital accounting. Just as hospital charges are for the most part phony numbers, so are most estimates of uncompensated care. Still, the is no denying that hospitals like Grady Health in Atlanta and Parkland Memorial in Dallas would not exist, or would not be able to maintain the current level of service, without a great deal of government money. 

That’s where ObamaCare comes in. One of the ways that the health reform is being funded is through cuts in disproportionate share funding for hospitals. The theory was: if more people ― especially low and moderate income people ― are insured, there will be less need for hospital subsidies. That theory overlooked four important features of the reform, however. ...

The whole post is worth reading.