Across the country, states are reducing Medicaid benefits and cutting Medicaid payments to providers.

According to a recent survey, 33 states are trying to reduce Medicaid payments to providers and another 16 hope to freeze those payments.

All of this is taking place as millions are expected to become eligible for Medicaid in 2014, when the Medicaid expansion directed by the Affordable Care Act takes effect.

Reductions in Medicaid benefits and payments to providers are especially damaging to urban safety-net hospitals, which care for far larger proportions of Medicaid patients than the typical American hospital.  The Obama administration reportedly is attempting to introduce a regulation that would make it harder for states to reduce provider payments – a policy that would benefit urban safety-net hospitals

Read more about this situation here, in an Associated Press report published in the Chicago Tribune.

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