Why Safety Net Hospitals Need Our Support...

• As New Jersey’s State Fiscal Year 2017 budget looms, safety net hospitals cannot sustain further cuts to essential hospital funding.
   

• 75% of all patients receiving care at New Jersey’s safety nets are covered by government programs, like Medicaid. 

   

• Medicaid reimbursement in our state is woefully low; further reductions to funding will only negatively impact the ability for safety nets to care for our state’s most critically vulnerable populations.

   

• While the Affordable Care Act extended coverage to hundreds of thousands of New Jerseyans, hundreds of thousands more remain uninsured and need a viable safety net health system to care for them.

   

• Even for those who gained coverage, urban hospitals remain their primary access point to the health system – and that access must be preserved. Coverage without access is no better than being uninsured.

   

• New Jersey must take advantage of the opportunity to reinvest funding in areas that bolster the safety net, not cut it, like educating the next generation of physicians, improving population health, and addressing our state’s behavioral health crisis.*

   

• Our safety net hospitals employ 32,000 people and provide high quality care for millions of New Jersey residents.  They must be protected. 

* Patients with severe mental illness (SMI) die an average 25 years earlier than the general population and are more likely to have chronic health conditions.  Furthermore, 47.9% of avoidable Medicaid hospitalizations and 26% of ED visits were associated with a behavioral health/substance use disorder.