TOWNSHEND-I'm writing with a correction for my piece, "Ten miles from where?" [Viewpoint, Sept. 2].
I wrote that the lowest payer in Brattleboro Memorial Hospital's published price file - $4,764 for an ordinary vaginal delivery - was "almost certainly Vermont Medicaid." I hedged it because I couldn't confirm it; the transparency files don't name the payer.
Since the piece was published, the Department of Vermont Health Access (DVHA) has answered my records request.
Vermont Medicaid pays BMH $5,759.02 for that delivery, not $4,764. The figure follows exactly from the state's published rate methodology, which DVHA pointed me to - BMH's Medicaid base rate is $10,100, multiplied by the diagnosis-related group weight of 0.5702. Whoever the $4,764 payer is, it isn't Medicaid.
This doesn't change the argument. Medicaid pays 54% of the commercial rate rather than 45% - still barely half, for a service line where nearly half the patients are Medicaid beneficiaries, at a rate that hasn't had an inflationary increase in five or six years and "was woefully inadequate then," in the hospital's own testimony.
The point of the paragraph was the gap, and the gap is still there - it's just confirmed now. Everything else in it - the Blue Cross figure, the testimony, the share of babies paid at that rate - is unchanged.
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