Green Mountain Care Board trims hospital requests for increases to 2025 budget, service charges
VTDigger
A key Vermont health care regulator reduced hospital budgets by millions of dollars for the 2025 fiscal year, setting out financial guardrails for how the facilities can operate over the next 12 months.
The decisions, announced Friday by the Green Mountain Care Board, place caps on how much Vermont hospitals can charge for services and how much revenue they can bring in from those services.
Earlier this year, Vermont’s hospitals asked the board to sign off on a 5.7% systemwide increase in charges for patient care to private insurers, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield and MVP. Hospitals sought to raise their patient revenue — money brought in from caring for patients — by a total of 8%.
But the board capped overall commercial charge growth for patient care at an increase of 3.4% or less over the current fiscal year for each hospital. And revenue from patient services can grow only 4.1% systemwide in the next fiscal year, per the board’s orders.
The decisions will take effect in hospitals’ 2025 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.
Owen Foster, the chair of the Green Mountain Care Board, said in an interview Monday that the board’s decisions were an attempt to balance competing concerns: affordability, access and the viability of the state’s hospitals.