Hocking County commissioners join hospital consortium to pursue tax-based Medicaid matching funds

Hocking County commissioners voted on Thursday to join a multi-county consortium that will assess a tax on participating hospitals and use the collected funds to increase Medicaid reimbursement dollars, and they appointed a county representative to serve on the consortium.

A commissioner described the model as already used in other states — notably Texas and Florida — and said the program’s purpose is to pool locally collected hospital taxes as state/local contributions that can be used to draw additional federal Medicaid matching funds. The presenter and other commissioners said the program does not change patient billing and, in their description, the hospital itself pays the tax to the county, which then participates in a matching scheme intended to generate more federal Medicaid…