Oversight could cost CHKD millions

NORFOLK, Va. (WAVY) - A local delegate admits an oversight in Richmond could cost a Norfolk hospital nearly four million dollars over two years.

Delegate Chris Jones is a member of the Subcommittee for Health and Human Services. He says the committee thought it had fixed the budget so that CHKD would not lose any money over the next two years, but it turns out what the group thought was approved and what lawmakers actually approved don't add up.

"I never saw the final spread sheet I guess I should have and for that I take responsibility."

Delegate Chris Jones says he can't believe it happened.

"We thought that we had taken care of CHKD. Obviously we didn't," he said. "This is the budget and these are my working papers so I had a lot of moving parts."

CHKD is in a unique position among Virginia hospitals -- it has the highest number of Medicaid inpatient days in the whole state. When lawmakers cut Medicaid reimbursements to hospitals, Jones said they didn't want to hurt the kids, and made every effort to help, or so he thought.

"What we did is we exempted CHKD," he said. "I guess what happened was when they did the formula, because of Kaine's introduced budget, we just never went back really to..." make sure it added up.

Now CHKD could be forced to make tough cuts of its own.

CHKD CEO Jim Dahling said, "We'll have to look at jobs. We'll have to look at access sites. We'll have to look for services. But I'm not sitting down at this point to do that."

Jones hopes it won't come to that either.

"So we're going to work with the Governor hopefully have that reconciled," he said.

CHKD is hopeful too, for the sake of the thousands of kids who come here every year and the thousands who take care of them.

"We've gotten great response from Delegate Jones, great response from the governor's office, and I really believe that this will be resolved," said Dahling.