Why did democrats change their tune on hospitals? (Re: health prices)

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What changed?

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Fed. Money kickbacks.
Covid kickbacks.
Acceptance of neo-fascism.

The liberal wealthy and the liberal government dependent.

Neither are affected by hospital fees and insurance cost like the middle class conservatives.

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In 2012, Medicaid and Medicare paid around the same per treatment to hospitals.

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Where are you getting this information? Medicare pays much better than Medicaid and Commercial pays better than both. Hospitals with heavy M’caid volumes in poor and rural areas have been closing for years. Plus, M’caid is different in every state.

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I feel like a 2000s democrat would have been outraged at the amount of tax dollars flowing to hospital profits. Yet democrats took the side of hospitals recently re: regulating Medicaid rates.

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Sorry but your post is incomprehensible. What are you advocating?

This post is mostly fair, but the medicaid vs. medicare claim is off - medicaid has almost always paid less than medicare. Even today, hospitals argue they lose money on most medicaid patients, which is why they lean so heavily on provider-tax schemes and supplemental payments.

To your question of what changed, I think the biggest thing was the ACA medicaid expansion. Before ~'14, hospitals ate huge losses from uninsured patients, and politicians of both parties could/would bash “hospital pricing” without much blowback. After expansion, medicaid became the largest insurer in the country (~90 million) and the backbone of rural health care & that seems to have flipped the politics. Cutting hospital medicaid rates now looks less like “fighting corporate fat cats” and more like “risking losing your town's only ER” and thus both parties defend hospital payments more fiercely today. And yeah, industry lobbying.

I remember when hospitals were literally stacking bodies in the hallway

Medicaid, which is administered by the State, supplemented by federal monies, historically paid less than Medicare in most places. It can vary from state to state. The main driver of the Medicaid increase was to supplement the large number of illegals who were showing up in the ERs, either using them for their primary care or thru accidents and lack of insurance. The hospitals lobbied for more money to take care of these people since the legislation (EMTALA) basically said they could not be turned away.

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What changed?

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The new Democrat mantra: Funding cuts kill people.

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The new Democrat mantra: Funding cuts kill people.

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And this has a lot of truth to it.

One aspect of this that folks seem to be waking up to is that Medicaid and Medicare are not paid to lazy undeserving people. The payments are to health care providers. If the pay scale is cut so that the reimbursement is below the cost for the provider, the facilities close or move or significantly scale back services. When that happens, the medical service becomes unavailable for everyone regardless of insurance.

That is the consequence that has to be avoided. This isn’t a Republican or democrat thing because we all need medical services.