Senate Bill 10, 80th Legislature, Regular Session, 2007, directs the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) to create a workgroup to help develop standardized reporting requirements for uncompensated hospital costs. This will provide the state with the consistent and reliable information it needs to make sound policy decisions.
The bill requires HHSC to develop rules that standardize the definition of uncompensated care, identify a methodology for its reporting, and develop procedures for hospitals to report the cost of that care. HHSC also may develop procedures to periodically verify the completeness and accuracy of the information reported by hospitals, and the Attorney General may impose penalties for failure to submit timely reports or correct inaccuracies.
The workgroup must be established no later than October 1, 2007, and HHSC must adopt rules standardizing the definition of uncompensated care by January 1, 2009. The workgroup will help:
- Identify the number of different reports that must be submitted to the state related to uncompensated hospital care, care for low-income people in the state, or both.
- Standardize the definitions used to determine uncompensated hospital care for purposes of those reports.
- Improve the tracking of hospital charges, costs, and adjustments as related to identifying uncompensated hospital care and maintaining a hospital’s tax-exempt status.
- Develop and apply a standard set of adjustments to a hospital’s initial computation of the cost of uncompensated hospital care that account for all funding streams that are not patient-specific and are used to offset the hospital’s initially computed amount of uncompensated care.
- Develop a standard and comprehensive center for data analysis and reporting with respect to uncompensated hospital care.
- Analyze potential legislation to incorporate the changes made by the standardization.
Finally, the HHSC Executive Commissioner must review the methodology used under the Medicaid Disproportionate Share Hospitals (DSH) supplemental payment program to compute low-income utilization costs to ensure it is consistent with the standardized adjustments to uncompensated care costs.
