Although the funds would come from California hospitals, which had requested the levy, Gov. Schwarzenegger said the bill lacks an appropriation of state funds to pay for “the significant departmental workload associated with implementing this bill.”
He added that the bill “contains no authority for the funds to be distributed to hospitals.”
Furthermore, he said the bill could not go into effect until Jan. 1, 2010, because it lacked an “urgency clause.”
The California Hospital Association says members need the extra Medi-Cal funding, as Medicaid is called in California, because the state does not have the funds to pay its share of the match and, even in 2008, hospitals in the state lost more than $4.2 billion in unpaid Medi-Cal costs.
Read Gov. Schwarzenegger’s signing message on California hospital fee legislation.
