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Patients Could Still Be on the Hook for Outpatient Costs, Costs If They Test Negative, and Cost Sharing A new KFF analysis estimates that between 670,000 and 2 million uninsured people around the country eventually could be hospitalized with COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
The $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act contains $100 billion for hospitals. This post examines key questions about how that money will be used.
As the coronavirus continues to spread, the number of people on Medicare admitted to the hospital for COVID-19 related illness is expected to rise. We analyze how much Medicare beneficiaries could pay out-of-pocket for an inpatient hospital admission under traditional Medicare (assuming no supplemental coverage) or Medicare Advantage plans.
Zachary Levinson, Project Director of KFF’s Program on Medicare Policy, testified before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Ways and Means on April 26, 2023 as part of a hearing on Tax-Exempt Hospitals and the Community Benefit Standard.
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.
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.
Few issues are likely to matter as much to voters in November’s presidential election as President Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic crisis, which have left almost 200,000 Americans dead and prompted job layoffs and furloughs affecting tens of millions of Americans.
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.
This data note examines rural hospitals’ operating margins in recent years. After seeing higher margins early in the pandemic, likely due to government relief funds, rural hospitals now face renewed challenges, especially in states that have not expanded Medicaid.
Since 2021, federal law has required hospitals to publicly post information about their standard prices and negotiated discount rates for common health services to encourage consumers to compare prices and to promote competition.
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