The ink had barely dried before Tuesday’s news of the closure of Fort Scott’s emergency room was spun into political fodder.
Gov. Laura Kelly used it as another example that Kansas should expand Medicaid eligibility, providing hospitals, clinics and ERs across the states additional funding to care for the elderly and indigent.
Republicans Ty Masterson, Senate president, and Dan Hawkinson, House Speaker, said the fault lies with Ascension Via Christi, the ER’s parent organization, for its inability to get the ER designated as a rural hospital.
“The Governor has sadly chosen to make empty promises on a real solution to an actual problem,” the Republicans said in a press release.
FIRST THINGS first.
The Republicans’ response is disingenuous.
At this point, Fort Scott is unable to qualify its emergency room as a Rural Emergency Hospital — a relatively new designation crafted by Congress in 2020 and state lawmakers earlier this year to help rural communities better access healthcare.
Per law, only critical access hospitals that are foundering or have closed as of Dec. 27, 2020, qualify for the new designation.
Fort Scott’s ER fails on both accounts.
Fort Scott’s Mercy Hospital closed in early 2019. Its parent organization at the time was the St. Louis-based Mercy system.
Ascension Via Christi, which owns Pittsburg’s hospital, came to the ER’s rescue and reopened it with a two-year agreement, which it had extended up until now.
As a stand-alone emergency room, it has been losing almost $1 million a year, according to the Oct. 10 minutes of the Bourbon County Commission.
As with Fort Scott’s former Mercy Hospital, two key factors contribute to the ER’s financial woes.
First, the ER is not associated with a hospital that has a critical access designation, qualifying it for cost-based reimbursements by the federal government. The designation is designed for small, rural hospitals with 25 or fewer acute beds, with Medicare paying extra to compensate for low patient volumes.
Mercy was never designated as a critical access hospital in part because it was too large of an operation and its multiple attempts to circumvent the guidelines set by the Center for Medicare Services were denied.
