Late News: Iowa hospitals, lawmakers butt heads over Medicaid bump

Iowa Gov. Chet Culver and state legislators are feuding with the management of several dozen hospitals in the state in a dispute over whether a 1% bump in Medicaid funding approved last year was properly passed on to Iowa’s 12,000 nurses. The increase amounted to about $2.9 million in combined state and federal Medicaid funding to be distributed among Iowa nurses, state officials say. “We said we wanted it to be a one-time thing; we wanted to put a little money in the nurses’ pockets,” state Sen. Thomas Courtney said after a Senate Government Oversight Committee hearing on the payments Feb. 26. “When the time came to pay the nurses, they didn’t do it. They just didn’t give them the money.” The Iowa Hospital Association, which helped draft the Medicaid funding language toward the end of the 2008 legislative session, said the bill does not stipulate that the money was intended to be given out as a one-time bonus. “We maintain every dime of that 1% increase has gone to support salary increases for nurses at Iowa hospitals,” said association Senior Vice President Greg Boattenhamer, who testified on the matter before two legislative committees in February.