ACHI President and CEO Dr. Joe Thompson, Baptist Health President and CEO Troy Wells, and UAMS Medical Center CEO Dr. Steppi Mette discuss the challenges Arkansas hospitals are facing in a recent Talk Business and Politics story.

Staffing issues, inflation, and supply chain disruptions are among the difficulties described in the story. Dr. Thompson notes that Arkansas’s decision to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act has provided a financial safety net for hospitals, but their future is still uncertain.

“It’s $2-plus billion a year pumped out into the health care system, and I think you see the effects of that on hospital closures in surrounding states that we’ve not had yet,” Thompson tells reporter Steve Brawner. “That does not mean that the effects of the pandemic don’t heighten the risk to our hospitals. I think we’re just kind of in the early stabilization phase where we’ll see how much economic hardship our hospitals are going to face going forward.”

For more on this topic, see ACHI Health Policy Director Craig Wilson’s recent column written for the same publication.