Hospitals and health systems throughout the nation provide critical care 24 hours a day, seven days a week while under financial strain. But powerful special interests are lobbying Congress to enact harmful Medicare cuts that would put American patients and the hospitals they count on at risk.
Here are some key facts reporters should consider as they cover corporate insurers’ lobbying campaign to boost their own profits by cutting Americans’ hospital care:
- Proposals to cut hospital care fail to account for key differences between Hospital Outpatient Departments (HOPDs) and other sites of care, and cutting hospital care would threaten a critical lifeline for patients.
- Hospitals treat sicker, lower-income patients with more complex and chronic conditions than those treated in independent physician offices or ambulatory surgery centers.
- Hospitals and their staff are better equipped to handle complications and emergencies, which often require the use of additional resources that other care settings do not typically provide, such as access to ICUs and other critical hospital services.
- Hospitals treat any patient who walks into the emergency room at any hour of the day, regardless of ability to pay.
- Mounting financial pressure due to Medicare and Medicaid underpayments from the government and lack of prompt payments from corporate insurance companies is already threatening patient access to local hospital care in communities across America.
- Despite the vital role hospitals play in our healthcare system, a majority operated at a loss in 2022.
- More than 149 rural hospitals have been forced to close or reduce their services while hundreds more are at risk of closing.
- Proposed cuts to hospital care threaten access to essential health services and would fall disproportionately on rural America and underserved communities where many hospitals are already at risk of closing.
Yet the same corporate insurance companies that are banking record profits by delaying and denying Americans’ care are now pushing Congress to slash funding for hospital care—and patients will pay the price.
If they side with corporate insurance companies to cut hospital care, Washington politicians would jeopardize access to crucial services that only hospitals provide, including for patients in rural and underserved areas.
Cutting hospital care is not a solution to the challenges of healthcare costs and access. Medicare cuts to hospital care will increase the financial strain on hospitals and further threaten Americans’ access to the care they need, especially in rural and underserved communities.
- To learn more about how cutting hospital care will hurt patients, click here.