Category Archives: Economic Stimulus

After criticism, HHS directs $25B in CARES funding to Medicaid providers, safety net hospitals

Posted on by • Posted in American Hospital Association (AHA), Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS), Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Financially Distressed, Hospital, Medicaid, Medicaid Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Rural Hospital, Safety Net Hospitals, Safety-Net Providers, The CARES Act • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/after-criticism-hhs-directs-25b-in-cares-funding-to-medicaid-providers-s/579496/

Dive Brief:

  • HHS announced Tuesday it will deliver $25 billion to providers and hospitals that serve the nation’s most vulnerable patients, or those with Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program coverage. Of that, $15 billion will go to providers that primarily serve Medicaid and CHIP patients while the other $10 billion is reserved for safety net hospitals that usually operate on razor-thin margins. A total of 758 safety net hospitals will receive direct deposits, and the administration noted that many of these facilities are operating in the red with an average profit margin of -7%.
  • Not all Medicaid providers received Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security funding from the initial general distribution. This targeted allocation is designed to make up for that by distributing money to the remaining 38% of Medicaid and CHIP providers who were left out of the first tranche.
  • These Medicaid providers will receive at least 2% of reported gross patient revenue, but could receive more depending on how many patients they serve. HHS will make a final determination once providers start submitting data to the relief portal.

Dive Insight:

The industry has been clamoring for HHS to target funding to Medicaid providers amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the downturn in business, noting these organizations are already on fragile ground.

Last week the American Hospital Association pleaded for the administration to release $50 billion more for all hospitals, with $10 billion reserved for providers with a heavy caseload of Medicaid patients.

HHS answered the hospital lobby’s call — in part. HHS will distribute funds to safety net providers — more than AHA asked for — but disclosed no plans Tuesday to broaden that funding to all hospitals. America’s Essential Hospitals, which represents safety net providers, had also called for the quick release of targeted funding.

“Our goal for all these distributions has been to get the money to the providers who need it most as soon as possible,” Eric Hargan, HHS deputy secretary, said Tuesday during a call with reporters.

However, some have been critical of how the administration decided to allocate the first few waves of funding.

Congress has earmarked a total of $175 billion in funding for providers through two pieces of legislation, including the CARES Act.

To get the money out the door quickly, the first tranche was sent to providers based on the Medicare fee-for-service business, and later on the net patient service revenue.

These formulas put certain providers at an advantage, which tend to be for-profit hospitals with higher-margins, or those who were already well off heading into the pandemic, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation analysis.

This targeted funding was not swift, one reason for the delay was the challenge in getting a list of Medicaid providers from the states to validate and authenticate those who came to the portal to apply for funds, according to a senior HHS official.​

Still, providers that have already received funds have noted that it comes with its own set of headaches. Some have decided to return the funds as navigating the legal and compliance issues may not be worth the hassle.

Though, that’s likely not the case for these safety net hospitals and providers.

 

 

 

 

8 nonprofit health systems got $1.7B bailout, furloughed more than 30,000 workers

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Cash, Cash Reserves, Coronavirus, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Employee Benefits, Employee Furlough, Employee Hiring Freeze, Employee Layoffs, Employee Pay Cuts, Employee Protections, Employer-Based Health Insurance, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Job, Job Market, Job Search, Job Security, Operating Expenses, Operating Income, Operating Margin, Operating Performance, Operating Revenue, Pandemic, The CARES Act, Unemployment, Unemployment Insurance • Leave a comment

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/8-nonprofit-health-systems-got-1-7b-bailout-furloughed-more-than-30-000-workers.html?utm_medium=email

Sixty of the largest hospital chains in the U.S., including publicly traded and nonprofit systems, have received more than $15 billion in emergency funds through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, according to an analysis by The New York Times. 

Congress has allocated $175 billion in relief aid to hospitals and other healthcare providers to cover expenses or lost revenues tied to the COVID-19 pandemic. The first $50 billion in funding from the CARES Act was distributed in April. Of that pool, HHS allocated $30 billion based on Medicare fee-for-service revenue and another $20 billion based on hospitals’ share of net patient revenue. HHS also sent $12 billion to hospitals that provided inpatient care to large numbers of COVID-19 patients and $10 billion to hospitals and other providers in rural areas.

Though one of the goals of the CARES Act was to avoid job losses, at least 36 of the largest  hospital systems that received emergency aid have furloughed, laid off or reduced pay for workers, according to the report.

Approximately $1.7 billion in bailout funds went to eight large nonprofit health systems: Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.; Trinity Health in Livonia, Mich.; Beaumont Health in Southfield, Mich.; Henry Ford Health System in Detroit; SSM Health in St. Louis; Mercy in St. Louis; Fairview Health in Minneapolis; and Prisma Health in Greenville, S.C. Mayo Clinic furloughed or cut hours of about 23,000 workers, and the other seven health systems furloughed or laid off a total of more than 30,000 employees in recent months, according to The New York Times.

The pandemic has taken a financial toll on hospitals across the U.S. They’re losing more than $50 billion per month, according to a report from the American Hospital Association. Of the eight nonprofit systems that collected $1.7 billion in relief aid, several have reported losses for the first quarter of this year, which ended March 31. For instance, Mayo Clinic posted a $623 million net loss, SSM Health’s loss totaled $471 million, and Beaumont and Henry Ford Health System reported losses of $278 million and $235 million, respectively.

Since CARES Act payments were automatically sent to hospitals, some health systems have decided to return the funds. Kaiser Permanente, a nonprofit system, is returning more than $500 million it received through the CARES Act. The Oakland, Calif.-based health system ended the first quarter with a $1.1 billion net loss.

Access the full article from The New York Times here. 

 

 

 

Hospitals Got Bailouts and Furloughed Thousands While Paying C.E.O.s Millions

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Balance Sheet, Cash, Cash Reserves, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Employee Benefits, Employee Furlough, Employee Hiring Freeze, Employee Layoffs, Employee Pay Cuts, Employee Protections, Employer-Based Health Insurance, Executive Compensation, Financially Distressed, For-Profit, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Job, Job Market, Job Search, Job Security, Labor Spend Management, Labor Union, Nurses, Nurses Union, Operating Expenses, Operating Income, Operating Margin, Operating Performance, Operating Revenue, Pandemic, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Supply Chain, The CARES Act, Worker Protection • Leave a comment

Hospitals Got Bailouts and Furloughed Thousands While Paying ...

Dozens of top recipients of government aid have laid off, furloughed or cut the pay of tens of thousands of employees.

HCA Healthcare is one of the world’s wealthiest hospital chains. It earned more than $7 billion in profits over the past two years. It is worth $36 billion. It paid its chief executive $26 million in 2019.

But as the coronavirus swept the country, employees at HCA repeatedly complained that the company was not providing adequate protective gear to nurses, medical technicians and cleaning staff. Last month, HCA executives warned that they would lay off thousands of nurses if they didn’t agree to wage freezes and other concessions.

A few weeks earlier, HCA had received about $1 billion in bailout funds from the federal government, part of an effort to stabilize hospitals during the pandemic.

HCA is among a long list of deep-pocketed health care companies that have received billions of dollars in taxpayer funds but are laying off or cutting the pay of tens of thousands of doctors, nurses and lower-paid workers. Many have continued to pay their top executives millions, although some executives have taken modest pay cuts.

The New York Times analyzed tax and securities filings by 60 of the country’s largest hospital chains, which have received a total of more than $15 billion in emergency funds through the economic stimulus package in the federal CARES Act.

The hospitals — including publicly traded juggernauts like HCA and Tenet Healthcare, elite nonprofits like the Mayo Clinic, and regional chains with thousands of beds and billions in cash — are collectively sitting on tens of billions of dollars of cash reserves that are supposed to help them weather an unanticipated storm. And together, they awarded the five highest-paid officials at each chain about $874 million in the most recent year for which they have disclosed their finances.

At least 36 of those hospital chains have laid off, furloughed or reduced the pay of employees as they try to save money during the pandemic.

Industry officials argue that furloughs and pay reductions allow hospitals to keep providing essential services at a time when the pandemic has gutted their revenue.

But more than a dozen workers at the wealthy hospitals said in interviews that their employers had put the heaviest financial burdens on front-line staff, including low-paid cafeteria workers, janitors and nursing assistants. They said pay cuts and furloughs made it even harder for members of the medical staff to do their jobs, forcing them to treat more patients in less time.

Even before the coronavirus swept America, forcing hospitals to stop providing lucrative nonessential surgery and other services, many smaller hospitals were on the financial brink. In March, lawmakers sought to address that with a vast federal economic stimulus package that included $175 billion for the Department of Health and Human Services to hand out in grants to hospitals.

But the formulas to determine how much money hospitals receive were based largely on their revenue, not their financial needs. As a result, hospitals serving wealthier patients have received far more funding than those that treat low-income patients, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

One of the bailout’s goals was to avoid job losses in health care, said Zack Cooper, an associate professor of health policy and economics at Yale University who is a critic of the formulas used to determine the payouts. “However, when you see hospitals laying off or furloughing staff, it’s pretty good evidence the way they designed the policy is not optimal,” he added.

The Mayo Clinic, with more than eight months of cash in reserve, received about $170 million in bailout funds, according to data compiled by Good Jobs First, which researches government subsidies of companies. The Mayo Clinic is furloughing or reducing the working hours of about 23,000 employees, according to a spokeswoman, who was among those who went on furlough. A second spokeswoman said that Mayo Clinic executives have had their pay cut.

Seven chains that together received more than $1.5 billion in bailout funds — Trinity Health, Beaumont Health and the Henry Ford Health System in Michigan; SSM Health and Mercy in St. Louis; Fairview Health in Minneapolis; and Prisma Health in South Carolina — have furloughed or laid off more than 30,000 workers, according to company officials and local news reports.

The bailout money, which hospitals received from the Health and Human Services Department without having to apply for it, came with few strings attached.

Katherine McKeogh, a department spokeswoman, said it “encourages providers to use these funds to maintain delivery capacity by paying and protecting doctors, nurses and other health care workers.” The legislation restricts hospitals’ ability to use the bailout funds to pay top executives, although it doesn’t stop recipients from continuing to award large bonuses.

The hospitals generally declined to comment on how much they are paying their top executives this year, although they have reported previous years’ compensation in public filings. But some hospitals furloughing front-line staff or cutting their salaries have trumpeted their top executives’ decisions to take voluntary pay cuts or to contribute portions of their salary to help their employees.

The for-profit hospital giant Tenet Healthcare, which has received $345 million in taxpayer assistance since April, has furloughed roughly 11,000 workers, citing the financial pressures from the pandemic. The company’s chief executive, Ron Rittenmeyer, told analysts in May that he would donate half of his salary for six months to a fund set up to assist those furloughed workers.

But Mr. Rittenmeyer’s salary last year was a small fraction of his $24 million pay package, which consists largely of stock options and bonuses, securities filings show. In total, he will wind up donating roughly $375,000 to the fund — equivalent to about 1.5 percent of his total pay last year.

A Tenet spokeswoman declined to comment on the precise figures.

The chief executive at HCA, Samuel Hazen, has donated two months of his salary to a fund to help HCA’s workers. Based on his pay last year, that donation would amount to about $237,000 — or less than 1 percent — of his $26 million compensation.

“The leadership cadre of these organizations are going to need to make sacrifices that are commensurate with the sacrifices of their work force, not token sacrifices,” said Jeff Goldsmith, the president of Health Futures, an industry consulting firm.

Many large nonprofit hospital chains also pay their senior executives well into the millions of dollars a year.

Dr. Rod Hochman, the chief executive of the Providence Health System, for instance, was paid more than $10 million in 2018, the most recent year for which records are available. Providence received at least $509 million in federal bailout funds.

A spokeswoman, Melissa Tizon, said Dr. Hochman would take a voluntary pay cut of 50 percent for the rest of 2020. But that applies only to his base salary, which in 2018 was less than 20 percent of his total compensation.

Some of Providence’s physicians and nurses have been told to prepare for pay cuts of at least 10 percent beginning in July. That includes employees treating coronavirus patients.

Stanford University’s health system collected more than $100 million in federal bailout grants, adding to its pile of $2.4 billion of cash that it can use for any purpose.

Stanford is temporarily cutting the hours of nursing staff, nursing assistants, janitorial workers and others at its two hospitals. Julie Greicius, a spokeswoman for Stanford, said the reduction in hours was intended “to keep everyone employed and our staff at full wages with benefits intact.”

Ms. Greicius said David Entwistle, the chief executive of Stanford’s health system, had the choice of reducing his pay by 20 percent or taking time off, and chose to reduce his working hours but “is maintaining his earning level by using paid time off.” In 2018, the latest year for which Stanford has disclosed his compensation, Mr. Entwistle earned about $2.8 million. Ms. Greicius said the majority of employees made the same choice as Mr. Entwistle.

HCA’s $1 billion in federal grants appears to make it the largest beneficiary of health care bailout funds. But its medical workers have a long list of complaints about what they see as penny-pinching practices.

Since the pandemic began, medical workers at 19 HCA hospitals have filed complaints with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about the lack of respirator masks and being forced to reuse medical gowns, according to copies of the complaints reviewed by The Times.

Ed Fishbough, an HCA spokesman, said that despite a global shortage of masks and other protective gear, the company had “provided appropriate P.P.E., including a universal masking policy implemented in March requiring all staff in all areas to wear masks, including N95s, in line with C.D.C. guidance.”

Celia Yap-Banago, a nurse at an HCA hospital in Kansas City, Mo., died from the virus in April, a month after her colleagues complained to OSHA that she had to treat a patient without wearing protective gear. The next month, Rosa Luna, who cleaned patient rooms at HCA’s hospital in Riverside, Calif., also died of the virus; her colleagues had warned executives in emails that workers, especially those cleaning hospital rooms, weren’t provided proper masks.

Around the time of Ms. Luna’s death, HCA executives delivered a warning to officials at the Service Employees International Union and National Nurses United, which represent many HCA employees. The company would lay off up to 10 percent of their members, unless the unionized workers amended their contracts to incorporate wage freezes and the elimination of company contributions to workers’ retirement plans, among other concessions.

Nurses responded by staging protests in front of more than a dozen HCA hospitals.

“We don’t work in a jelly bean factory, where it’s OK if we make a blue jelly bean instead of a red one,” said Kathy Montanino, a nurse treating Covid-19 patients at HCA’s Riverside hospital. “We are dealing with people’s lives, and this company puts their profits over patients and their staff.”

Mr. Fishbough, the spokesman, said HCA “has not laid off or furloughed a single caregiver due to the pandemic.” He said the company had been paying medical workers 70 percent of their base pay, even if they were not working. Mr. Fishbough said that executives had taken pay cuts, but that the unions had refused to take similar steps.

“While we hope to continue to avoid layoffs, the unions’ decisions have made that more difficult for our facilities that are unionized,” he said. The dispute continues.

Apparently anticipating a strike, a unit of HCA recently created “a new line of business focused on staffing strike-related labor shortages,” according to an email that an HCA recruiter sent to nurses.

The email, reviewed by The Times, said nurses who joined the venture would earn more than they did in their current jobs: up to $980 per shift, plus a $150 “Show Up” bonus and a continental breakfast.

 

 

 

 

HCA nurses say they face layoffs if they don’t give up negotiated pay increases

Posted on by • Posted in 401K, Economic Stimulus, Elective Procedures, Elective Surgery, Employee Benefits, Employee Layoffs, Employee Pay Cuts, Employee Protections, Employee Wage Freeze, Employment Agreement, Employment Contract, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Labor Relations, Labor Union, Medicare Advance Payments, Nurses, Nurses Union, Quality, Quality of Care, The CARES Act • Leave a comment

HCA nurses say they face layoffs if they don’t give up negotiated pay increases

HCA nurses say they face layoffs if they don't give up negotiated ...

Nurses at 15 HCA hospitals represented by National Nurses United protested last week, saying the for-profit hospital chain threatened layoffs.  Nurses took to the sidewalks outside of their hospitals with signs, after they said they were told to expect cuts to benefits and staff if they didn’t give up negotiated wage increases.

In an emailed statement, HCA said it had no plans for layoffs.

A letter obtained by MedCity News threatened the possibility of reductions if the nurses did not accept HCA’s proposal.

The letter stated:

“The facts are that non-represented colleagues across the HCA Healthcare enterprise are taking pay reductions and non-represented colleagues are giving up wage increases this year. HCA Healthcare has made these tough decisions in order to preserve jobs. To be equitable to all of our colleagues across the enterprise, we recently reached out to unions, with the hope that during this time of crisis, they would support the same measures for our unionized employees to minimize the impact on your compensation and employment status. …  If the (National Nurses Organizing Committee) and/or (Service Employees International Union) reject our proposal, colleagues represented by these unions will no longer be eligible for continued pandemic pay, may be subject to layoffs and may face other benefit changes.”

Nurses interviewed by MedCity News said they were asked to give up other benefits.

Zoe Schmidt, a registered nurse who works at Research Medical Center in Kansas City, said they were also asked to forego their 401(k) matching for the year and shift differential pay, or increased compensation for nurses that work night and weekend shifts.

 

 

 

Chart of the Day: The Dire State of State Tax Revenues

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Employee Benefits, Employee Furlough, Employee Hiring Freeze, Employee Layoffs, Employee Pay Cuts, Employee Protections, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Job, Job Market, Job Search, Job Security, Market Outlook, Medicaid, State Budgets, Uncompensated Care, Underinsured, Unemployment, Unemployment Insurance, Uninsured • Leave a comment

https://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2020/06/02/Chart-Day-Dire-State-State-Tax-Revenues

Chart of the Day: The Dire State of State Tax Revenues | The ...

Lucy Dadayan of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center breaks down the good, the bad and the ugly of the fiscal crisis facing states as the coronavirus pandemic crushes revenues and raises costs.

“Prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, most states were generating solid revenue growth. And many built up robust rainy day funds. But the pandemic has largely wiped out earlier revenue gains and most states now anticipate substantial revenue shortfalls for the current fiscal year and for fiscal year 2021,” she writes.

The good: Preliminary April tax revenue data show a steep drop in estimated and final annual tax payments as the tax-filing deadline got pushed back from April 15 to July 15. But taxes withheld from paychecks grew in 17 states compared to April 2019. “Tax withholding is usually a better indicator of the current strength of the economy and of the path for personal income tax revenue because it comes largely from current wages,” Dadayen explains. On the other hand, 16 states reported declines of less than 10%, while five states posted double-digits drops, so the bright spots are limited.

The bad: “Declines in sales tax revenues have been fast, steep, and widespread across the states,” Dadayen writes. How steep? April sales tax revenues fell by 16% across 42 states for which the Tax Policy Center has complete data. Twenty-three states reported double-digit declines, while just five states reported year-over-year growth. And since the April data mostly reflect March sales, the May numbers are likely to be even worse.

The ugly: For the fiscal year so far, total state tax revenue has fallen sharply — and next year is expected to be worse. “With two months remaining in the fiscal year for 46 states, total state tax revenues are now down about $57 billion, compared to last year,” Dadayen writes.

After the sharp pandemic-related plunge in April, tax revenues have fallen in 34 states compared to 2019 and risen in 12. (New York, the state hit hardest by the virus, is surprisingly among those dozen, but Dadayen says that’s only because its fiscal year 2020 ended in March, so April’s devastation isn’t reflected in the data. The state reported that net taxes and fees collected in April, the first month of its new fiscal year, fell by 69% compared with April 2019.)

Chart of the Day: The Dire State of State Tax Revenues | The ...

 

 

 

A Third of Unemployment Benefits Haven’t Been Paid Out: Report

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Dept of Labor, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Employee Benefits, Employee Furlough, Employee Hiring Freeze, Employee Layoffs, Employee Pay Cuts, Employee Protections, Employer-Based Health Insurance, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Policy, Job, Job Market, Job Search, Job Security, Market Outlook, Pandemic, Underinsured, Unemployment, Unemployment Insurance, Uninsured • Leave a comment

https://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2020/06/02/Third-Unemployment-Benefits-Haven-t-Been-Paid-Out-Report

A Third of Unemployment Benefits Haven't Been Paid Out: Report

The U.S. Treasury paid out $146 billion in jobless benefits in the three months ending in May as tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs due to the coronavirus pandemic. Although the number is massive – larger than all of the unemployment benefits provided during the depths of the Great Recession in 2009 – it’s smaller than it should have been, according to a new analysis by Bloomberg News. Crunching the numbers on weekly unemployment filings and average claim size, Bloomberg found that total jobless benefits should have come to roughly $214 billion during that time.

“The estimated gap of some $67 billion shows how emergency efforts to boost payments, and deliver them via creaking state-level systems, are lagging the needs of a jobs crisis that’s seen more than 40 million people file for unemployment as the economy shut down,” Bloomberg’s Shawn Donnan and Catarina Saraiva wrote Tuesday.

A tough calculation: Although it’s hard to put a precise number on the shortfall – the Labor Department pushed back against the method used by Bloomberg to develop its estimate – there is general agreement that there are many people who still haven’t received the unemployment assistance they are entitled to. “There’s a lot more money that should have gone out that has not gone out,” said Jay Shambaugh, an economist at the Brookings Institution who has been studying the issue.

And Bloomberg says its analysis likely provides a conservative estimate of the shortfall. Some states are still working through backlogs of unemployment claims – Texas alone is waiting to verify nearly 650,000 cases – and more than 7 million people are still owed retroactive benefits under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program for independent contractors.

Why it matters: In addition to the unnecessary suffering the delays are causing, the shortfall is reducing the positive economic effect that unemployment benefits are intended to provide. “On paper the U.S. strategy is very generous,” Ernie Tedeschi, a former U.S. Treasury economist now at Evercore ISI, told Bloomberg. “But that generosity on paper is meaningless if it doesn’t translate into actual money in people’s pockets when they need it.”

Diane Swonk, chief economist at the accounting firm Grant Thornton, said she is worried that lawmakers are experiencing “fiscal fatigue” as the crisis wears on, risking a falloff in aid that could prolong the recession. “We’re really talking about an economy that is going to be operating at a fraction of its capacity for a long period of time,” she told Bloomberg.

 

 

 

 

Unemployment Claims Top 42 Million

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Economy Reopening, Employee Benefits, Employee Furlough, Employee Hiring Freeze, Employee Layoffs, Employee Pay Cuts, Employee Protections, Employer-Based Health Insurance, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Job, Job Market, Job Search, Job Security, Underinsured, Unemployment, Unemployment Insurance, Uninsured • Leave a comment

https://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2020/06/04/Unemployment-Claims-Top-42-Million

Unemployment Claims Top 42 Million

About 1.9 million people filed for unemployment benefits last week, the Department of Labor announced Thursday, bringing the total for initial claims over the last 11 weeks to 42.6 million.

Continuing claims rose by 649,000 over the previous week, for a total of 21.5 million. Adding independent contractors, the number of people receiving unemployment benefits comes to roughly 30 million.

The good news: Initial jobless claims for state benefits continue to fall. Torsten Slok, chief economist at Deutsche Bank Securities, said the job market appears to have bottomed out and is “crawling out of the hole now,” adding that we “have the worst behind us.”
Earlier this week, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said he thinks the coronavirus recession is technically over, with growth resuming this month. “This Covid recession will go down as the shortest and arguably the most severe in history,” Zandi told The Washington Post.

The bad news: The unemployment numbers are still shockingly high, and the economy is in bad shape by any measure. “Even as states reopen, claims in the millions are an indicator that the economic pain of the Covid-19 crisis is still acute,” Daniel Zhao, senior economist at Glassdoor, told CNBC.

Recovery is expected to be slow and painful. Economist Ed Yardeni said Thursday in a note to clients that he expects it to take more than two years to recover all of the lost jobs, with a return to the February 2020 employment peak not coming until October 2022.

The even worse news: The official unemployment numbers are almost certainly underestimating the damage.

In addition to the state unemployment filings, there were about 623,000 newly reported claims from independent contractors, who are eligible to receive federal aid temporarily under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program. But at least half a million filings for pandemic relief payments have yet to show up in the official data, Bloomberg reported Thursday, due to lags in the system. And the weekly unemployment reports tell us nothing about the people who may still be working but are earning far less than they were just a few months ago.

Up next: On Friday the Labor Department will release its employment numbers for May. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones project 8.3 million job losses and an unemployment rate of 20.5%.

 

 

 

 

Hospitals push for release of $50B more in COVID-19 funds

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, America's Essential Hospitals, American Hospital Association (AHA), Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Medicaid, Vulnerable Populations • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/hospitals-push-for-release-of-50b-more-in-covid-19-funds/579072/

COVID-19 Stimulus Bill: What It Means for States

Dive Brief:

  • The American Hospital Association is urging HHS to distribute at least $50 billion more in funding from the $175 billion allocated by Congress to hospitals as providers continue to wrestle with the challenges spurred by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. 
  • More funds are “urgently needed” for the more than 5,000 hospitals and health systems AHA represents, the group wrote in a letter to HHS Secretary Alex Azar on Tuesday.
  • While AHA is calling for more money for all hospitals, it also wants a special focus paid to hospitals in hot spot areas and those serving a higher number of Medicaid and uninsured patients. 

Dive Insight:

AHA is requesting $10 billion for hot spot areas, $10 billion for hospitals with a larger share of Medicaid and uninsured patients and another $30 billion for all hospitals, including inpatient rehabilitation centers and inpatient psychiatric facilities.

Making substantial funds of money available will help facilities weather the pandemic and will “actually ensure they are able to keep their doors open,” AHA CEO Richard Pollack wrote. The second quarter is expected be the hardest hit to hospital operations.​

On Tuesday, the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response said it was making available another $225 million for health systems. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the total federal funds that have already gone out the door. 

So far, the federal government has earmarked a total of $175 billion to disperse to hospitals and providers across the country. Only a portion of those funds have gone out. Initially, HHS sent out $30 billion directed to all eligible hospitals, based on Medicare fee-for-service. The criteria for funding faced criticism over seemingly giving an advantage to certain hospitals over others, such as those with many Medicaid patients.

Other more targeted tranches have followed, including $20 billion based on net patient service revenue. Disbursements of $10 and $12 billion were reserved for rural providers and hot spots, respectively.

AHA’s latest requests seems to acknowledge the concerns others have raised about providers with high Medicaid numbers.

Late last month, America’s Essential Hospitals, which represent safety net hospitals, said the administration should quickly move to dstribute more funding to facilities serving large shares of uninsured and Medicaid members.

“They continue to struggle with the heavy financial costs of this public health emergency and need relief now,” Bruce Siegel, CEO of AEH, said in a statement.

HHS developed funding formulas that rely heavily on a Medicare and net patient service revenue, so facilities that rely more on Medicaid as opposed to private insurers and Medicare, like pediatric hospitals, are at a disadvantage when it comes to receiving funds.

As such, AHA is calling for an additional $20 billion, divided evenly between hot spot hospitals and those with a large share of Medicaid patients.

“These hospitals care for the nation’s most vulnerable patients, who, largely as a result of underlying health conditions, have suffered disproportionately from the pandemic. They have been hospitalized at greater rates, and required more care and resources once hospitalized,” AHA said of hospitals with large shares of Medicaid patients.