Call me a cynic, but...
Congress appropriated much more money this year than any previous year (through the Medicare Reform Bill) targeted specifically at 'border' hospitals to defray the cost of providing health care to illegals. Each state was to receive a portion, further broken down by county, for their medical facilities.
Your slice of the pie is based on the number of non-paying patients you treat and the estimated loss incurred by your facility. In order to arrive at those numbers, you need to do a study of case load and unpaid billed services...which leads to the information we read in this article.
What's going on, here? /sarcasm