The New York Legislature approved $49.07 billion of new appropriations in its fiscal 2009 Health Department budget on Monday that includes $227.6 million of new capital projects.
The bill also reappropriated $860.5 million of capital spending. Some of the capital costs will be reimbursed through proceeds of bonds sold by the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York. The state Division of Budget has not yet calculated how much bonding the appropriation bill will require.
The fiscal 2009 executive budget released in January called for the state to sell $94.4 million of personal income tax bonds for health care grants and $518.9 million for mental health facilities.
The state budget was due at midnight Monday, but is now expected to be finished later in the week and to total around $124 billion.
Gov. David Paterson and the Legislature agreed to several health care reforms yesterday including a major change to how medical facilities are reimbursed through Medicaid.
The agreement begins the process of "rebasing," under which payment formulas for procedures that were established in 1981 will be updated to reflect the cost of such procedures in 2005. The agreement also shifts $170 million annually from inpatient care to outpatient primary and preventive care.
"It's an important shift that's long overdue," said Courtney Burke, director of the New York State Health Policy Research Center at the Rockefeller Institute, a policy think tank. "Medical technology has evolved and so the way care is delivered has evolved as well but what hasn't evolved is the way we pay for the care, so what we were paying for was not necessarily reflective of the procedure that was done."
Under the agreement, which the Legislature was expected to vote on yesterday, the state would establish a task force to oversee a phased-in implementation of the rebased payment formulas that would be complete by 2012.
