Hospitals

Most patients do not know about the new surprise billing protections and likely also do not know of resources available to seek recourse for incorrect medical bills. This brief provides resources to privately insured patients who receive surprise balance bills and also summarizes relevant policies and how they apply to balance billing.

In this column, KFF President and CEO Drew Altman explores the state of consumer protections in health care and explains why, even with consumer frustration clear, Congress is unlikely to pursue major new health insurance protections but there could be some modest steps.

Promoting price transparency in health care is a policy approach with bi-partisan support in Congress and the public at large. This analysis examines the vast troves of price transparency data that payers are required and finds unlikely prices, inconsistencies, and other oddities that pose major challenges for efforts to use it to promote competition and drive down prices.

Editor’s Note: The press release was updated on March 27, 2023, to reflect corrections in the underlying analysis, resulting in a modest increase in the total estimated value of tax exemption, from $27.6 to $28.1 billion. The tax-exempt status of the nation’s nonprofit hospitals collectively was worth about $28 billion…

This data note estimates that the value of tax exemption for nonprofit hospitals was $28 billion in 2020. This amount exceeds estimated charity care costs among nonprofit hospitals in 2020 ($16 billion), though charity care represents only a portion of the community benefits reported by nonprofit hospitals.

KFF analysis of data from the American Hospital Association (AHA) Annual Survey shows that the overall share of hospitals reporting hiring foreign-educated RNs has nearly doubled between 2010 and 2022, and a growing share of hospitals report hiring an increasing number of foreign-educated RNs to fill vacancies over time.

New federal financial incentives for Medicaid expansion and the increased reliance on Medicaid as a coverage safety net during the pandemic have renewed debate in the 12 states that have not adopted the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. A new KFF literature review provides context for these expansion…

This literature review report summarizes evidence from nearly 200 studies on the effects of Medicaid expansion published between February 2020 and March 2021. These studies generally find beneficial impacts of expansion across a range of areas.

A KFF synthesis of recent studies finds that Medicaid expansion has been beneficial to the finances of hospitals and providers, driving decreases in the share of uninsured patients, increases in Medicaid-covered patients and declines in uncompensated care. By financing coverage for low-income people who are likely to otherwise be uninsured,…

This issue brief updates prior KFF literature reviews by summarizing 24 studies published between April 2021 and December 2022 on the economic impact of Medicaid expansion on providers.