How Hospital Forecasting Just Got Tougher

Healthcare CFOs may not realize it, but they've been promoted to CEO—Chief Everything Officer. With all that's happening in healthcare and so much riding on making the correct strategic financial decisions, CFOs now need to know everything not only about the bottom line but the patient front lines as well. There are no longer any initiatives that don't tie back to an organization's coffers, which makes one thing certain: the CFO has the most challenging job at the organization.

Take the recent Supreme Court ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Financial leaders need to understand the intricacies of this decision in order to calculate its impact on the revenues and reimbursements of their individual organizations. However, even the U.S. Congressional Budget Office is finding this task challenging.

This past week, the CBO released a revised estimate of the impact the PPACA will have on the government budget in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling. The upshot is a reduced cost of an estimated $84 billion over 11 years, the majority of which will come from states that opt out of participating in the Medicaid expansion.