Hospitals decry proposed Medicare, Medicaid cuts

{mosads}Medicare and Medicaid cuts were included in the Simpson-Bowles plan, which also recommended strengthening an expert cost-cutting board that hospitals strongly oppose. Hospitals are exempt from the new panel’s cuts until 2019.

The AHA said it absorbed big enough cuts in healthcare reform and shouldn’t have to take more as Congress debates raising the debt ceiling and then moves on to fiscal 2012 spending bills.

“We strongly oppose efforts to further cut payments for hospital services under Medicare and Medicaid,” the AHA alert says. “It’s time that every other sector of society be held to the same level of shared sacrifice — examination and scrutiny — as we have been.”