Hospital tax passes Georgia Senate
The Georgia Senate Thursday approved a proposed tax on hospitals that Gov. Sonny Perdue is counting on to help balance Georgia’s recession-ravaged fiscal 2011 budget.
The 1.45 percent tax on net patient revenues, which passed 31-15, would raise $163 million to help shore up a state Medicaid program hit with significant enrollment increases due to the recession.
Hospital organizations, which balked when the governor recommended a 1.6 percent tax in January, had come around to support the bill as preferable to other alternatives Perdue said he was prepared to push forward.
Without the revenue from the hospital tax, the governor would be forced to slash Medicaid reimbursements to hospitals and other health-care providers by as much as 16.5 percent, said Senate President Pro Tempore Tommie Williams. That would hurt hospitals’ ability to serve low-income Georgians and drive some doctors to stop accepting Medicaid patients, said Williams, R-Lyons.
“This is about women with children in poverty and the aged, blind and disabled,” he said. “We that have give to those who don’t.”
But Democrats argued that taxing hospitals would hurt the very people Medicaid is designed to help because the tax would be passed on to poor patients.
“This is a sick tax that’s being placed on people in hospitals,” said Senate Minority Leader Robert Brown, D-Macon.
The bill’s supporters, however, said the tax would help Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital, the state’s largest public hospital, because the additional state revenue would allow Georgia Medicaid to draw down several hundred million dollars in federal matching funds. Grady serves more Medicaid patients than any other hospital in Georgia.
In an effort to garner support for the bill, Republican legislative leaders put a three-year time limit on the tax.
But the measure’s opponents said there are better ways to raise the needed revenue. Throughout this year’s legislative session, health-care advocates have been pushing lawmakers to raise tobacco taxes in Georgia by $1 a pack.
The bill now goes back to the House to vote on changes made by the Senate.