Baptist Health CEO hoping for more stability in health care arena

Like nearly every other hospital CEO, funding challenges, policy changes at the state and federal level, and the never-ending struggle to contain rising costs and improve access are on Baptist Health CEO Troy Wells’ daily agenda.

The chief executive of the Little Rock-based health system that stretches west to Fort Smith and south to Monticello said increasing Arkansas’ low Medicaid and Medicare rates would help significantly with stability for all hospitals and health care providers.

“The challenge really gets back to Medicare and how long that payment system has been in place,” said Wells. “We’re the lowest paid Medicare state in the country, and to change that, it’s a budget neutral thing in Washington. So you’d have to have legislation passed to change the formula. With the formula the way it is today, we’re kind of stuck, and it’s very difficult to get enough support in the House to make a change because it’s different across the country.

“Medicaid, as you know, we’ve not had a lot of raises in Medicaid over the last few decades, and so I think there’re discussions going on right now as to strategies as to how we could do that without burdening the state budgets by bringing more Medicaid dollars maybe through an increased provider tax and things like that.”

Arkansas traditional Medicaid is a roughly 71%-29% split between the federal and state government, meaning the feds provide 71% of the funding and the state matches at a 29% level. For the Medicaid expansion program that is part of the Affordable Care Act, the federal-state split is 90-10%.

Arkansas lawmakers have not introduced a major overhaul of Medicaid since the expansion program changed several years ago with ARHOME.

“I know we’re going to have a Medicaid discussion at some point during the session or maybe after the session, but that’ll be the biggest thing is how we deal with Medicaid program going forward,” said Wells. “We have to have a new waiver soon, and so how we do that’s going to be really important.”

Gov. Sarah Sanders and legislative allies proposed this week new legislation to address the state’s worst-in-the-nation maternal health statistics. The $45 million program aims to bring pregnant mothers into the health care system earlier in an effort to curtail problems that could be addressed through better prenatal care. It also includes increased Medicaid funding for certain prenatal and delivery procedures.

Wells said the maternal health initiative is a huge step in the right direction.

“My first reaction is it’s desperately needed,” he said. “We need more attention on this issue. Maternal health care, moms and babies, and the state’s got a lot of options when they have a little extra money here and there. The reality is it takes money to solve some of these problems. And so for the state and the governor to get behind this and be willing to put some funding behind the work that needs to be done to improve maternal care says a lot.”

Wells also addressed rumors of potential acquisitions and divestitures in markets that Baptist Health serves, including Fort Smith and Monticello.

“The fact is we have not talked to anybody about any divestitures in the last year,” he said. “The only conversations we’ve had in this merger and acquisition space has been about adding hospitals to Baptist Health, and there are a lot of hospitals out there that need help.

“We acquired Drew Memorial last year and so that’s been about one year since they’ve been part of our system. We are having more conversations in southeast Arkansas on how we can stabilize that part of the state in terms of health care resources. All of the hospitals are having a difficult time. How can we work together and make that better? Southwest Arkansas is another part of the state that could probably use some help, and we’ve had conversations with hospitals in that part of the state as well.”

You can watch Wells’ full interview in the video below.