How much money can you take out of the healthcare system before it starts to hurt the quality?

Joe Stratton, Geary Community Hospital CEO said that the Affordable Care Act, or Healthcare Reform was passed to ensure that more people had access to healthcare and insurance.

“So far it’s been a good experiment, it’s worked in some ways and in some it hasn’t; one of the things that we’ve suffered from that I spoke about in my letter is that Kansas is not a Medicaid expansion state, and essentially what that means is that a state can go together with the federal government with Medicare and Medicaid and pull down more dollars back in to your state to offset a cost to make sure more people have insurance care,” said Stratton.

Stratton said the second goal of the ACA was to take costs out of the state healthcare system.

“Governor Brownback and the Legislature have not been able, and seemingly as a group have not wanted to move forward with that – there’s some 35 states that have expanded Medicaid – so, another hit that we took out of the Governor’s office…the Governor announced there was going to be another cut to us, right at Geary Community Hospital and all hospitals across the State; well, we know that that’s about $200,000 less, or a hit that we’re suffering in our current budget year,” said Stratton.

Stratton emphasized that Geary Community Hospital officials are working to maintain the services offered with the same level of quality.

Stratton’s full comments from his interview on JC Now on 1420 KJCK can be accessed here: JC Now.