HAPI Ordinance?

According to the Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council (MCHC), hospital access in Cook County is threatened by a proposed Cook County ordinance, the Healthcare Access Protection Initiative (HAPI).

TAKE ACTION: Take our survey about this ordinance (located on the right side of this blog page) and tell us what you think! Should the Cook County Board move forward with the HAPI ordinance or should they hold off while national health care reform is being debated?

Here is the action alert from the MCHC:

Despite its name, the HAPI ordinance would actually force hospitals to cut services by imposing an arbitrary new standard for charity care and taxing hospitals that do not meet this predetermined threshold. The proposal does not take into consideration any of the community benefits provided by hospitals, including support for research, screenings and community health education, and money losing programs and services such as emergency and trauma care. In fact, non-for-profit hospitals in Cook County provide over $2.5 billion in charitable community benefits to the communities they serve. They also provide over $877 million in free care, roughly the operating budget of the Cook County Health and Hospital System.

If implemented, hospitals in Cook County would face about $340 million in new taxes, in turn forcing hospitals to make service cuts or quite possibly shutter their doors, negatively impacting access to care and potentially affecting 5,000.

While we certainly understand the intent of the HAPI ordinance – to ensure access to care for the uninsured – the proposal would have the opposite effect as it attempts to solve the problem of the uninsured on the backs of our local hospitals at the cost of reduced access to care.

Please urge your Cook County commissioner (click here) to oppose an ordinance that would severely limit access vital care services.