    Vermont’s 14 hospitals have submitted budget proposals to the Green Mountain Care Board for the coming fiscal year that total $2.422 billion, an increase of $114 million over last year’s tab. The percentage increase was 5.0 percent, well over the Board’s 3.5 percent target.
   Mike Davis, the Board’s finance chief, presented the figures to the members yesterday. He said the numbers were still a bit rough; they haven’t been fully vetted yet. But he said they’ll be ready by mid-August, when the Board opens hearings with the individual hospitals.
   Once the hearings are completed, the board will arrive at a decision on each hospital by mid-September, and the budgets will go into effect on Oct. 1, the beginning of FY2017. If a hospital disagrees with the Board decision on its budget the hospital can appeal the decision to the Vermont Supreme Court.
   The key number in each budget is the increase in the hospital’s Net Patient Revenue. The increase in each hospital’s NPR number is shown in the graph below. It shows that 10 of the 14 have exceeded the Board’s target of 3.5 percent. There can be a host of reasons why that should be so, some of them good, others not so much. Those are the decisions the Board will have to make in the next six weeks.