UCHealth, Colorado’s largest health care provider, has prevailed for now in an exceptionally complicated fight with the state Medicaid agency over hospital provider fee money — a dispute that could see as much as $50 million a year shift away from public hospitals and move to private hospitals, according to state officials.
The fight has to do with whether two UCHealth hospitals that once were public, Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins and Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs, should still be considered public. UCHealth, a private nonprofit, has for years managed the hospitals under its banner pursuant to long-term lease agreements.
But the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing continued to classify the two hospitals as public for the purposes of the hospital provider fee — a mechanism the state uses to draw down a boatload of federal money, much of which it sends back to hospitals…