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First Congressional District of New Mexico
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ask.heather@mail.house.gov

In Washington DC
442 Cannon House
Office Building
Washington, DC
20515
202-225-6316 Phone
202-225-4975 Fax
In Albuquerque
20 First Plaza NW
Suite 603
Albuquerque, NM
87102
505-346-6781 Phone
505-346-6723 Fax

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Memorial Day 2006
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Congresswoman Heather Wilson, First Congressional District of New Mexico


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Protecting Rural Heath Care April 03, 2008
 
Dear Friends,

Health care is one of the issues I work on a lot in the Congress. Sometimes there are federal rules for important programs that just don’t make sense. We’re dealing with one now.

New Mexico has had a program in place in rural areas since 1993 called the Sole Community Provider program to allow counties that have only one hospital to use local property taxes and gross receipts taxes for an indigent care fund to put up the county’s share of funds and match those funds with the federal Medicaid program. This has been a very important source of funds for small rural hospitals and for the UNM Hospital in Albuquerque.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid has proposed a rule to prevent local taxes like this from being used to match federal dollars. While the rule was intended to stop some other practices that should be stopped, the Sole Community Provider program is caught up in the rule.

There are a lot of hospitals in New Mexico that would be affected by this, from San Juan Regional in Farmington to Eastern New Mexico Medical Center in Roswell.

We had a hearing on a bill to stop the implementation of this rule today in the Health Subcommittee on which I serve. I’m hoping that increasing the pressure and attention on this issue will cause the federal Medicare bureaucracy to stop or modify their rule. Otherwise, our estimates are a loss of $114 million to our rural hospitals every year.

We’ll keep working to get it fixed.

Wish you were here, 


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