Category Archives: The CARES Act

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.

 

 

 

COVID-19 impact on hospitals worse than previously estimated

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Average Length of Stay (ALOS), Cash, Cash Reserves, Clinical Testing, Contact Tracing, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, EBITDA, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Emergency Preparedness, Employee Furlough, Employee Hiring Freeze, Employee Layoffs, Employee Pay Cuts, Employee Protections, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Intensive Care (ICU), Net Income, Nonoperating Income, Operating Expenses, Operating Income, Operating Margin, Operating Performance, Operating Revenue, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Social Distancing, Supply Chain, The CARES Act, Ventilators • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/covid-19-impact-hospitals-worse-previously-estimated?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWTJOaU5EWTJOekZsWWpBMCIsInQiOiJEeUZmbVFWVEFmUUxiMElydWdrMmNzY2RtNEdMbmRmM3BFMUFiYTRDOTFBYktPVVJ3ZUFTbTVwR2VzZkNma2VLdUVTNWJ0cGxMNGZ3UjhHbWhDR3g2KzNLeTYrbHU1bCtOWFM1bzdIdXFyQmc2ZGFDNDA4NGNhbFZZT3R2c09wYSJ9

Coronavirus | MSF

Factors such as how many patients would need ICU treatment, average length of stay and fatality risk are straining hospital resources.

When it became evident that the COVID-19 pandemic would spread across the U.S., lawmakers, scientists and healthcare leaders sought to predict what the financial and operational impact on hospitals would be. In those early days, policymakers relied on data from China, where the pandemic originated.

Now, with the benefit of time, the early predictions seriously underestimated the coronavirus’ impacts. University of California Berkeley and Kaiser Permanente researchers have determined that certain factors — such as how many patients would need treatment in intensive care units, average length of stay and fatality risk — are much worse than previously anticipated, and put a much greater strain on hospital resources.

WHAT’S THE IMPACT

Looking primarily at California and Washington, data showed the incidents of COVID-19-related hospital ICU admissions totaled between 15.6 and 23.3 patients per 100,000 in northern and southern California, respectively, and 14.7 per 100,000 in Washington. This incidence increased with age, hitting 74 per 100,000 people in northern California, 90.4 per 100,000 in southern California, and 46.7 per 100,000 in Washington for those ages 80 and older. These numbers peaked in late March and early April.

Those numbers are greater than the initial forecast, especially when factoring in the virus itself. Modeling estimates based on Chinese data suggested that about 30% of coronavirus patients would require ICU care, but in the U.S., the probability of ICU admissions was 40.7%. Male patients are more likely to be admitted to the ICU than females, and also are more likely to die.

Length of stay was also higher than had been predicted. By April 9, the median length of stay was 9.3 days for survivors and 12.7 days for non-survivors. Among patients receiving intensive care, the median stay was 10.5 days, although some patients stayed in the ICU for roughly a month.

Long durations of hospital stay, in particular among non-survivors, indicates the potential for substantial healthcare burden associated with the management of patients with severe COVID-19 — including the need for ventilators, personal protective equipment including N95 masks, more ICU beds and the cancellation of elective surgeries.

The considerable length of stay among COVID patients suggests that unmitigated transmission of the virus could threaten hospital capacity as it has in hotspots such as New York and Italy. Social distancing measures have acted as a stop-gap in reducing transmission and protecting health systems, but the authors said hospitals would do well to ensure capacity in the coming months in a manner that’s responsive to changes in social distancing measures.

THE LARGER TREND

These challenges have placed a financial burden on hospitals that can’t be overstated. In fact, a Kaufman Hall report looking at April hospital financial performance showed that steep volume and revenue declines drove margin performance so low that it broke records.

Despite $50 billion in funding allocated through the CARES Act, operating EBITDA margins fell to -19%. They fell 174%, or 2,791 basis points, compared to the same period last year, and 118% compared to March. This shows a steady and dramatic decline, as EBITDA margins were as high as 6.5% in April.

 

 

The Battle Over State Bailouts

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economic Recovery, Economic Stimulus, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Medicaid, Medicare, Partisanship, Pension, Pension Funding, Recession, Socialism, State Budgets, The CARES Act • Leave a comment

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/01/coronavirus-state-bailout-budget-jobs-economy-impact-287704

Blue State Bailout? Red State Residents Received Largest Stimulus ...

Why Politics Keeps Tanking a Bailout Idea That Works.

Nobody in Congress likes to give other politicians money. But the track record shows that writing checks directly to states could keep the recession from becoming way worse.

The last time the American economy tanked and Washington debated how to revive it, White House economists pushed one option that had never been tried in a big way: Send truckloads of federal dollars to the states.

When President Barack Obama took office in January 2009 during the throes of the Great Recession, tax revenues were collapsing and state budgets were hemorrhaging. The Obama team was terrified that without a massive infusion of cash from Congress, governors would tip the recession into a full-blown depression by laying off employees and cutting needed services. So the president proposed an unprecedented $200 billion in direct aid to states, a desperate effort to stop the bleeding that amounted to one-fourth of his entire stimulus request.

But the politics were dismal. Republican leaders had already decided to oppose any Obama stimulus. And even Washington Democrats who supported their new leader’s stimulus weren’t excited to help Republican governors balance their budgets. Most politicians enjoy spending money more than they enjoy giving money to other politicians to spend. And since state fiscal relief was a relatively new concept, the Obama team’s belief that it would provide powerful economic stimulus was more hunch-based than evidence-based.

Ultimately, the Democratic Congress approved $140 billion in state aid—only two-thirds of Obama’s original ask, but far more than any previous stimulus.

And it worked. At least a dozen post-recession studies found state fiscal aid gave a significant boost to the economy—and that more state aid would have produced a stronger recovery. The Obama team’s hunch that helping states would help the nation turned out to be correct.

But evidence isn’t everything in Washington. Now that Congress is once again debating stimulus for a crushed economy—and governors are once again confronted with gigantic budget shortfalls—a partisan war is breaking out over state aid. Memories of 2009 have faded, and the politics have scrambled under a Republican presidential administration.

Democratic leaders have made state aid a top priority now that Donald Trump is in the White House, securing $150 billion for state, local and tribal governments in the CARES Act that Congress passed in March, and proposing an astonishing $915 billion in the HEROES Act that the House passed in May. Republican leaders accepted the fiscal relief in the March bill, but they kept it out of the last round of stimulus that Congress enacted in April, and they have declared the HEROES Act dead on arrival. Though they’re no longer denouncing stimulus as socialism, as they did in the Obama era, they’ve begun attacking state aid as a “blue-state bailout.”

Polls show that most voters want Washington to help states avoid layoffs of teachers, police officers and public health workers, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Fox News personalities, and other influential Republicans are trying to reframe state aid as Big Government Democratic welfare spending. Trump doesn’t want to run for reelection during a depression, and he initially suggested he supported state aid, but in recent weeks he has complained that it would just reward Democratic mismanagement.

“There wasn’t a lot of evidence that state aid would be good stimulus in 2009, but now there’s a lot of data, and it all adds up to juice for the economy,” Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi says. “It’s baffling that this is getting caught up in politics. If states don’t get the support they need soon, they’ll eliminate millions of jobs and cut spending at the worst possible time.”

The coronavirus is ravaging state budgets even faster than the Great Recession did, drying up revenue from sales taxes and income taxes while ratcheting up demand for health and unemployment benefits. But as Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney pointed out earlier this month: “Blue states aren’t the only ones who are getting screwed.” Yes, California faces a $54 billion budget shortfall, and virus-ravaged blue states like New York and New Jersey are also confronting tides of red ink. But the Republican governors of Texas, Georgia and Ohio have also directed state agencies to prepare draconian spending cuts to close massive budget gaps.

Fiscal experts say the new Republican talking point that irresponsible states brought these problems on themselves with unbalanced budgets and out-of-control spending has little basis in reality. Unlike the federal government, which was running a trillion-dollar deficit even before the pandemic, every state except Vermont is required by law to balance its budget every year. State finances were unusually healthy before the crisis hit; overall, they had reserved 7.6 percent of their budgets in rainy day funds, up from 5 percent before the Great Recession.

But now, governors of both parties are now pivoting to austerity, which means more public employees applying for unemployment benefits, fewer state and local services in a time of need, and fewer dollars circulating in the economy as it begins to reopen.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who has approved a plan to buy up to $500 billion worth of state and local government bonds to help ease their money problems, recently suggested that direct federal aid to states also “deserves a careful look,” which in Fed-speak qualifies as a desperate plea for congressional action.

Nevertheless, some Republicans who traditionally pushed to devolve power from the federal government to the states are now dismissing state aid as a bloated reward for liberal profligacy. Some fiscal conservatives have merely suggested that the nearly trillion-dollar pass-through to states, cities and tribes in the House HEROES bill is too generous given the uncertainties about the downturn’s trajectory. McConnell actually proposed that states in need should just declare bankruptcy, which is not even a legal option. Former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “Don’t Bail Out the States.” Sean Hannity told his Fox viewers that more fiscal relief would be a tax on “responsible residents of red states,” while Florida Senator (and former Governor) Rick Scott said it would “bail out liberal politicians in states like New York for their unwillingness to make tough and responsible choices.”

It was not so long ago that governors like Walker and Scott were burnishing their own reputations for fiscal responsibility with federal stimulus dollars. Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a bold experiment in using federal dollars to backstop states in an economic emergency, and its legacy hangs over the debate over today’s emergency.

By the time Obama won the 2008 election, the U.S. economy had already begun to collapse, and his aides had already given him a stimulus memo proposing a $25 billion “state growth fund.” The goal was anti-anti-stimulus: They wanted to prevent state spending cuts and tax hikes that would undo all the stimulus benefits of federal spending increases and tax cuts. The memo warned that states faced at least $100 billion in budget shortfalls, and that “state spending cuts will add to fiscal drag.” Cash-strapped states would also cut funding to local governments, accelerating the doom loop of public-sector layoffs and service reductions, pulling money out of the economy when government ought to be pouring money in.

The memo also warned that the fund might be caricatured as a bailout for irresponsible states and might run counter to the self-interest of politicians who enjoy dispensing largesse: “Congress may resist spending money that governors get credit for spending.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California wasn’t keen on creating a slush fund for her state’s Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and House Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina was even more suspicious of his GOP governor, Mark Sanford, an outspoken opponent of all stimulus and most aid to the poor.

After President-elect Obama addressed a National Governors Association event in Philadelphia, Sanford and other conservative Republicans publicly declared that they didn’t want his handouts—and many congressional Democrats were inclined to grant their wish. Even Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was worried about the politics of writing checks to governors who might run against Obama in 2012 on fiscal responsibility platforms.

There were plenty of studies suggesting that unemployment benefits and other aid to recession victims was good economic stimulus, because families in need tend to spend money once they get it, but there wasn’t much available research about aid to states. Congress had approved $20 billion in additional Medicaid payments to states in a 2003 stimulus package, but that aid had arrived much too late to make a measurable difference in the much milder 2001 recession.

Still, Obama’s economists speculated that state aid would have “reasonably large macroeconomic bang for the buck.” And the holes in state budgets were expanding at a scary pace, doubling in the first week after Obama’s election, increasing more than fivefold by Inauguration Day; Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities remembers giving the Obama team frequent updates on state budget outlooks that seemed to deteriorate by the hour.

Obama ended up requesting $200 billion in state fiscal relief in the Recovery Act, eight times his team’s suggestion from November, 10 times more than Congress had authorized in 2003. Emanuel insisted on structuring the aid through increases in existing federal support for schools and Medicaid, rather than just sending states money, so it could be framed as saving the jobs of teachers and nurses. (One otherwise prescient memo by Obama economic aide Jason Furman suggested the unwieldy title of “Tax Increase and Teacher & Cop Layoff Prevention Fund.”) Republicans overwhelmingly opposed the entire stimulus, so Democrats dictated the contents, and they grudgingly agreed to most of their new president’s request for state bailouts.

“State aid was the part of the stimulus where Obama met the most resistance from Democrats,” Greenstein says. “It had such a huge price tag, and nobody loved it. But we can see how desperately it was needed.”

The Obama White House initially estimated that each dollar sent to states would generate $1.10 in economic activity, compared with $1.50 for aid to vulnerable families or infrastructure projects that had been considered the gold standard for emergency stimulus. But later work by Berkeley economist Gabriel Chodorow-Reich and others concluded the actual multiplier effect of the Medicaid assistance in the Recovery Act was as high as $2.00. In addition to preventing cuts in medical care for the poor, it saved or created about one job for every $25,000 of federal spending—and the help arrived much faster than even the most “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects, landing in state capitals just a week after the stimulus passed.

“There were at least a dozen papers written on the state aid, and the evidence is crystal clear that it helped,” says Furman, who is now an economics professor at Harvard. “Unfortunately, it was incredibly hard to get Congress to do more of it, and that hurt.”

After all the bluster about turning down Obama’s money, the only Republican governor who even tried to reject a large chunk of the federal stimulus was Sanford, who was overruled by his fellow Republicans in the South Carolina Legislature. Sarah Palin of Alaska did turn down some energy dollars, while Walker and Scott sent back aid for high-speed rail projects approved by their Democratic predecessors, but otherwise the governors all used the cash to help close their budget gaps. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana appeared at the ribbon-cutting for one Recovery Act project wielding a giant check with his own name on it. Rick Perry of Texas used stimulus dollars to renovate his governor’s mansion—which, in fairness, had been firebombed.

Nevertheless, the Recovery Act covered only about 25 percent of the state budget shortfalls, and Republican senators blocked or shrank Obama’s repeated efforts to send more money to states, forcing governors of both parties to impose austerity programs that slashed about 750,000 state and local government jobs. In 2010, 24 states laid off public employees, 35 cut funding for K-12 education, 37 cut prison spending, and 37 cut money for higher education, one reason for the sharp increases in student loan debt since then. In a recent academic review of fiscal stimulus during the Great Recession, Furman estimated that if state and local governments had merely followed their pattern in previous recessions, spending more to counteract the slowdown in the private sector, GDP growth would have been 0.5 percent higher every year from 2009 through 2013.

The Recovery Act helped turn GDP from negative to positive within four months of its passage, launching the longest period of uninterrupted job growth in U.S. history. But there’s a broad consensus among economists that austerity in the form of layoffs and reduced services at the state and local level worked against the stimulus spending at the federal level, weakening the recovery and making life harder for millions of families.

“The states would’ve made much bigger cuts without the Recovery Act, but they did make big cuts,” says Brian Sigritz, director of fiscal studies at the National Association of State Budget Officers. “We’re seeing similar reactions now, except the situation is even worse.”

It took a decade for state budgets to recover completely from the financial crisis. 2019 was the first year since the Great Recession that they grew faster than their historic average, and the first year in recent memory that no state had to make midyear cuts to get into balance. Rainy-day funds reached an all-time high.

And then the pandemic arrived.

The government sector shed nearly a million jobs in April alone, which is more jobs than it lost during the entire Great Recession. The fiscal carnage has not been limited to states like New York and New Jersey at the epicenter of the pandemic; oil-dependent states like Texas and tourism-dependent states like Florida have also seen revenues plummet. The bipartisan National Governors Association has asked Congress for $500 billion in state stabilization funds, warning that otherwise governors will be forced to make “drastic cuts to the programs we depend on to provide economic security, educational opportunities and public safety.”

So far, Congress has passed four coronavirus bills providing about $3.6 trillion in relief, including $200 billion in direct aid to state, local and tribal governments for Medicaid and other pandemic-related costs. Republican Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts says the aid has come in handy in fighting the virus—not only for providing health care and buying masks but for helping communities install plexiglass in consumer-facing offices and pay overtime to essential workers. Massachusetts had more than 10 percent of its expected tax revenues in its rainy-day fund before the crisis, but its revenues have dried up, putting tremendous pressure on the state as well as its 351 local governments.

“You don’t want states and locals to constrict when the rest of the economy is trying to take off,” Baker said. “So far, we’ve gotten close to what we need, but the question is what happens now, because no one knows what the world is going to look like in a few months.”

In the initial coronavirus bills, Democrats pushed for state aid, and Republicans relented. But in the most recent stimulus that Congress enacted, the $733 billion April package focused on small-business lending, Democrats pushed for state aid and Republicans refused. McConnell has said he’s open to another stimulus package, but he has ridiculed the $3 trillion Democratic HEROES Act as wildly excessive, and rejected its huge proposal for state relief as a bailout for irresponsible blue states with troubled pension funds. Sean Hannity expanded the critique, warning Fox viewers that they were being set up to help Democratic states pay off their “unfunded pensions, sanctuary state policies, massive entitlements, reckless spending on Green New Deal nonsense, and hundreds of millions of dollars of waste.”

In fact, the state with the most underfunded pension plan is McConnell’s Kentucky, which has just a third of the assets it needs to cover its obligations, even though it had unified Republican rule until a Democrat rode the pension crisis to the governor’s office last fall. In general, red states tend to be more dependent on federal largesse than blue states, which tend to pay more taxes to the federal government; an analysis by WalletHub found that 13 of the 15 most dependent states voted for Trump in 2016, with Kentucky ranking third.

Trump initially suggested state aid was “certainly the next thing we’re going to be discussing,” before embracing McConnell’s message that state bailouts would unfairly reward incompetent Democrats in states like California. But California’s finances were also in solid shape before the pandemic, with a $5 billion surplus announced earlier this year in addition to a record $17 billion socked away in its rainy-day fund. Some of the partisan arguments against state aid have been flagrantly hostile to economic evidence; Walker’s op-ed actually blamed the state budget shortfalls after the Great Recession on “the disappearance of federal stimulus funds,” rather than the recession itself, as if the stimulus funds somehow created the holes by failing to continue to plug them.

But plenty of Republican politicians support state aid, especially in states that need it the most. The GOP chairmen of Georgia’s appropriations committees recently asked their congressional delegation to support relief “to close the unprecedented gap in dollars required to maintain a conservative and lean government framework of services.” Some Republicans believe McConnell’s opposition to state fiscal relief is just a negotiating ploy, so he can claim he’s making a concession when it gets included in the next stimulus bill.

“Some aid to states is inevitable and necessary,” says Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers. “I suspect McConnell just wants to set a marker, and make sure aid to states doesn’t become aid to pension funds and public employee union coffers.”

That said, it’s not just Republican partisans who are skeptical of the Democratic push for nearly a trillion dollars in state and local aid. The current projections of state budget gaps range as high as $650 billion over the next two years, but some deficit hawks question whether it’s necessary to fill all of them before it’s clear how long the economic pain will last, and before the Fed has even begun its government bond-buying program. Maya MacGuineas, president of the Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, was already disgusted by the trillion-dollar deficits that Washington ran up before the pandemic, and while she says it makes sense to add to those deficits to prevent states from making the crisis worse with radical budget cuts, she doesn’t think federal taxpayers need to cater to every state-level request.

“We have a little time to catch our breath now, so we should make sure that we’re only getting states what they need,” MacGuineas says. “It’s not a moment to be padding the asks.”

Tom Lee, a Republican state senator and former Senate president, says it’s impossible to know how much help states will need without knowing how quickly the economy will reopen, whether there will be a second wave of infections, when Americans will return to their old travel habits, and at what point there will be treatment or a vaccine for the virus. More than three-quarters of Florida’s general revenue comes from sales taxes, so a lot depends on when Floridians start buying things again, and how much they’re willing to buy. Lee says it’s reasonable to expect Washington to help in an emergency, since the national government can print money and Florida can’t, but that the federal money store can’t be open indefinitely, since Florida’s finances were in much better shape than Washington’s before the emergency.

“No question, we need help, but we can’t expect the feds to make us whole,” Lee says. “We’re going to have to tighten our belts, too.”

That’s exactly what Keynesian economic stimulus is supposed to avoid: the contraction of public-sector spending at a time when private-sector spending has already shriveled. A recent poll by the liberal group Data for Progress found that 78 percent of Americans supported $1 trillion in federal aid to states so they can “avoid making deep cuts to government programs and services.”

But Obama White House veterans say they learned two related lessons from their experience with state fiscal relief: It’s better to get too much than not enough, and it’s unwise to assume you can get more later. Stimulus fatigue was real in 2009, and it seems to be returning to Washington. Republicans who spent much of the Obama era screaming about the federal deficit have embraced a free-spending culture of red ink under Trump, but lately they’re starting to talk more about slowing down—not only with state aid, but especially with state aid.

“We’ve already seen how state contraction can undo federal expansion,” Furman says. “This is the one part of the economy where we know exactly what needs to be done, and we don’t need to invent a brand new creative idea. But I worry that we’re not going to do it.”

 

 

 

Hospitals to face bumpy recovery with depressed margins into 2021, S&P predicts

Posted on by • Posted in Coronavirus, Credit Quality, Credit Ratings, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Elective Procedures, Elective Surgery, Financially Distressed, Health System, Home Health, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Laboratory Industry, Market Outlook, Market Uncertainty, Medicare Advance Payments, Operating Expenses, Operating Income, Operating Margin, Operating Performance, Operating Revenue, Paycheck Protection Program, The CARES Act • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/SP-ratings-hospital-margins-historic-lows-until-2021/578815/

April was the worst month ever for hospital operating margins

Dive Brief:

  • Despite rebounding patient volumes at some health systems, an overall slow and bumpy recovery period is most likely to last into next year, according to analysts with S&P Global Ratings. Operating margins will remain below historic levels for the rest of 2020 and into early 2021.
  • The ratings agency took negative action against companies in health sub-sectors facing more sudden and dramatic declines in business and now face less certain paths to recovery than others, such as dental companies, along with physical therapy and ambulatory surgery centers.
  • Medical staffing and physician groups were also downgraded or had their outlooks revised, due to major declines in emergency room and doctors office visits​ coupled with declining demand for anesthesia and radiology services related to delayed surgeries.

Dive Insight:

Federal relief grants are helping offset major financial losses for some health systems in the short-term, but factors like a second surge causing another total lockdown, rising unemployment and hesitancy from patients as they return to medical settings make long-term prospects unpredictable.

S&P Global Ratings said in a report this week that it took 36 negative actions in health services companies during the pandemic. The most affected sub-sector was dental companies. It also changed outlooks on ambulatory surgery centers given significant volume declines.

Hospitals and home healthcare were rated at moderate to high financial risk, though analysts expect those businesses to recover faster due to the more essential nature of their services, according to the report. And in the short-term, government relief funds will help bolster hospitals’ liquidity as they attempt to return to normal operations and recover from steep losses.

Delayed elective care that’s just restarting in some states led most hospitals to the financial fallout. But even hospitals treating a large number of COVID-19 patients will be hurt, as these patients are expensive to treat due to higher supply and labor costs, the report said.

It also found that nonprofit and for-profit operators could fare differently in their financial recoveries. Non-profit hospitals generally have larger cash reserves than for profit systems, which rely instead almost exclusively on cash flow and borrowings for liquidity.

Providers are relying specifically on the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act which allocated $100 billion for providers that they don’t have to pay back, though there has been some criticism about how the money was distributed and whether it advantages some providers over others.

A Kaiser Family Foundation report found that CARES funding tends to favor for profit, higher margin hospitals with a higher mix of private payer revenue compared to those that rely on government payers such as Medicare and Medicaid.

Other legislation to help financially struggling health systems include advanced Medicare payments in the form of loans that must be paid back roughly four months after they are received.

The Paycheck Protection and Healthcare Enhancement Act passed in late April gave providers an additional $75 billion, though calculation and distribution methods have yet to be determined.

The U.S. House of Representatives also passed a $3 trillion bill dubbed the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act that allocates $100 billion for provider reimbursement and creates special enrollment periods for Medicare and Affordable Care Act plans, though the Trump administration said it’s too soon for additional relief funding.

Lab companies were put in the moderate risk category, and seeing a “40% decline in lab tests net of COVID testing,” S&P said.

Still, it said despite the drop in overall testing for LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics, S&P predicted “their services to become even more important, and for their services to recover reasonably well as testing related to the pandemic continues to grow and as medical procedures and physician visits ramp-up through the rest of the year and into 2021.”

 

 

 

Ascension reports loss of $2.7B in Q1

Posted on by • Posted in Cash, Cash Reserves, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Medicare Advance Payments, Net Income, Nonoperating Income, Operating Expenses, Operating Income, Operating Margin, Operating Performance, Operating Revenue, Pandemic, Supply Chain, The CARES Act • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/ascension-reports-loss-of-27b-in-q1-COVID/578579/

Dive Brief:

  • Ascension reported a total loss of $2.7 billion in the first three months of 2020, compared to income of $1.2 billion during the same time last year, according to new ​financial statements from the nonprofit giant.
  • The Catholic system, one of the largest hospital operators in the country, saw operating revenue decrease 2.5% year over year in the period ending March 31 to $6.1 billion. That came as expenses like salaries and supplies ticked up by more than 3% to $6.4 billion.
  • Ascension also reported losses from investments of $2.48 billion, compared to return from investments of $1.1 billion from the same time last year. Nonprofit operators are reporting massive investment hits as the stock market slid in the beginning of the year following widespread business closures and shelter-in-place orders stifling the economy.

Dive Insight:

Nonprofit hospitals are posting huge losses for the outset of 2020 as analysts predict an even grimmer second quarter to come. However, though losses in the first three months of the year dragged St. Louis-based Ascension into the red, the provider behemoth is still in a relatively good position to weather the pandemic, with current assets of $38.3 billion and 231 days of cash on hand.

Though patient volume was up prior to the pandemic, revenue from providing medical care flagged in the three-month period, as inpatient and ambulatory care slowed as the coronavirus surfaced in the U.S. In mid-March, Ascension deferred all non-essential procedures as stay-at-home orders kept potential patients in the home, impacting the system’s volumes.

Total net patient service revenue was $5.7 billion, down 3% year over year. Net patient service revenues had the sharpest drop off in March, decreasing more than 15% in that month alone.

“COVID-19 has been encountered across all Ascension markets, to varying degrees, and has had an adverse effect,” Ascension management wrote in comments on the results.​

The system, which operates more than 2,600 sites of care, including 150 hospitals across 20 states and the District of Columbia, has received federal help to make up for lower-than-expected revenue. Ascension said in the filing it has received Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act​ funding before March 31. Though a spokesperson declined to tell Healthcare Dive a specific figure, Ascension has received at least $211 million from HHS, according to a New York Times review of the grants finding large hospitals with deep pockets are receiving the lion’s share of congressional funds.

Smaller hospitals that serve more vulnerable populations were deeply critical of HHS’ initial method to distribute the CARES funds, which put high margin hospitals at an advantage. The department did not take into account hospitals’ existing financial resources in distributing the pot.

Nine-year-old Ascension also received just under $2 billion in accelerated loans from the Medicare program.

Normal increases in operations compounded the negative effect of the pandemic, Ascension said. The system was funneling money into expanding service lines and sites of care and standardizing revenue cycle services prior to the COVID-19 crisis, which sharply increased expenses.

Supplies expenses particularly jumped in March by almost 7%, as the system hustled to procure needed equipment at unexpected rates to prepare for an anticipated surge in COVID-19 patients.

 

 

 

 

Ascension reports $2.7B net loss in Q3

Posted on by • Posted in 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, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Medicare Advance Payments, Net Income, Nonoperating Income, Operating Expenses, Operating Income, Operating Margin, Operating Performance, Operating Revenue, Pandemic, Rev Cycle Management, Revenue Cycle, The CARES Act • Leave a comment

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Ascension, Google working on 'secret' patient data project, says ...

St. Louis.-based Ascension saw revenue decline in the three months ended March 31, and it ended the period with a net loss, according to unaudited financial documents. 

The 150-hospital system reported operating revenue of $6.1 billion in the third quarter of fiscal year 2020, down 2.5 percent from the same period a year earlier. Net patient service revenue dramatically declined in March due to a drop in patient volume attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“COVID-19 has been encountered across all Ascension markets, to varying degrees, and has had an adverse effect on the system’s revenues and operating margin,” management wrote in comments on the financial results.

Looking at the nine months ended March 31, net patient service revenue was up 1.9 percent year over year due to several factors, including an increase in physician office visits and expansion of service lines and sites of care. 

The health system’s expenses climbed more than 3 percent year over year to $6.4 billion in the third quarter, and expenses were up nearly 4 percent in the nine months ended March 31. Higher expenses related to expanded service lines and the transition toward standardized revenue cycle services pushed the system’s expenses higher before the COVID-19 pandemic, Ascension said. 

Ascension ended the most recent quarter with an operating loss of $429.4 million, compared to operating income of $80.1 million a year earlier. During the nine months ended March 31, the health system’s operating loss totaled $344.9 million.

After factoring in nonoperating items, including losses from investments of nearly $2.5 billion, Ascension reported a net loss of $2.7 billion in the third quarter of fiscal year 2020. In the same period a year earlier, the system recorded investment income of $1.1 billion and net income of $1.2 billion.

To help offset financial damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Ascension received funds from the $175 billion in relief aid Congress has allocated to hospitals and other healthcare providers to cover expenses and lost revenue tied to the pandemic. The health system received $211 million in federal grants, according to The New York Times.

Ascension also applied for and received about $2 billion of Medicare advance payments in April, which must be repaid. 

 

 

 

 

Advocate Aurora reports Q1 operating loss, gets $328M bailout

Posted on by • Posted in Cash, Cash Reserves, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Elective Procedures, Elective Surgery, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Medicare, Net Income, Nonoperating Income, Operating Expenses, Operating Income, Operating Margin, Operating Performance, Operating Revenue, The CARES Act • Leave a comment

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/advocate-aurora-reports-q1-operating-loss-gets-328m-bailout.html?utm_medium=email

MyAdvocateAurora | Health Record | Advocate Aurora Health

Advocate Aurora Health saw revenue increase year over year in the first quarter of this year, but it ended the period with an operating loss, according to recently released unaudited financial documents. 

Advocate Aurora Health, which was formed in 2018 and has dual headquarters in Downers Grove, Ill., and Milwaukee, reported revenue of $3.1 billion in the first quarter of 2020, up from $3 billion in the same period a year earlier. Patient service revenue climbed 3.5 percent year over year, while capitation revenue dropped 13.2 percent.

The health system said it began postponing or canceling elective procedures on March 17 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the public curtailed visits to physicians, clinics and emergency rooms for fear of contracting the virus.

“These actions have served to decrease revenues from non-COVID-19 patients while driving up costs to prepare for and care for COVID-19 patients with minimal additional revenues from these patients,” Advocate Aurora said.

To help offset financial damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the health system implemented cost-reduction measures. Since April 1, it has also received $328 million in grants made available through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act and about $730 million in advance Medicare payments, which must be paid back.

Advocate Aurora’s expenses were up 9 percent in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period of 2019. The increase was due in part to it acquiring the remaining 51 percent interest in Bay Area Medical Center in Marinette, Wis., in April 2019.

Advocate Aurora posted an operating loss of $85.6 million in the first quarter of this year. That’s compared to operating income of $112.8 million in the same period a year earlier. Excluding nonrecurring expenses, the health system posted an operating loss of $49.3 million in the first quarter of this year and operating income of $131.2 million a year earlier.

The 26-hospital system reported a nonoperating loss of $1.23 billion in the first quarter of this year, which was largely attributable to investment losses. Advocate Aurora ended the first quarter with a net loss of $1.3 billion, compared to net income of $596.8 million a year earlier. 

As of March 31, the health system had 229 days cash on hand, down from 274 days in December 2019. 

 

 

 

 

HCA asks union to abandon wage increases this year

Posted on by • Posted in Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Employee Benefits, Employee Layoffs, Employee Pay Cuts, For-Profit, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Labor Spend Management, Labor Union, Medicare, Nurses, Nurses Union, Paycheck Protection Program, The CARES Act • Leave a comment

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hr/hca-asks-union-to-abandon-wage-increases-this-year.html?utm_medium=email

HCA revenue beats the hospital chain's expectations in 2019

A union representing more than 150,000 registered nurses in hundreds of U.S. hospitals is disputing with Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare regarding pay and benefits.

National Nurses United said HCA is demanding that the union choose between an undetermined number of layoffs and no 401(k) match for this year or no layoffs and no nurse pay increases for the rest of the year, according to ABC affiliate Kiii TV.

HCA Healthcare, which to date has avoided layoffs due to the pandemic, told Becker’s Hospital Review it is asking the union to give up their demand for wage increases this year, just as nonunion employees have. HCA executive leadership, corporate and division colleagues and hospital executives have also taken pay cuts.  

The union said it takes issue with having to make this choice given HCA’s profits in the last decade, the additional funding the for-profit hospital operator received from the federal government’s Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, and additional Medicare loans.

“It is outrageous for HCA to use the cover of the pandemic to swell its massive profits at the expense of its dedicated caregivers and the patients who will also be harmed by cuts in nursing staff,” Malinda Markowitz, RN, California Nurses Association/National Nurses United president, said in a news release.

HCA pointed to the pandemic pay program it implemented and recently extended through at least the end of June that allows employees who are called off or affected by a facility closure and cannot be redeployed to receive 70 percent of their base pay.

“It is surprising and frankly disappointing that unions would demand pay raises for their members and may reject the continuation of a generous pay program that is providing continued paychecks for more the 100,000 colleagues,” HCA said in a statement. “The goal of HCA Healthcare’s pandemic pay program is to keep our caregivers employed and receiving paychecks at a time when hospitals throughout the country are experiencing significant declines in patient volume and there is not enough work for them.”

HCA said more than 16,000 union members have participated in the pandemic pay program, even though it is not part of their contract. 

 

 

 

 

Congress Should Redirect The Medicare Shared Savings Program To Address The COVID-19 Emergency

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economic Recovery, Economic Stimulus, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Medicare, Medicare ACO, Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP), The CARES Act • Leave a comment

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Congress Should Redirect The Medicare Shared Savings Program To ...

The COVID-19 virus has unleashed a rolling series of crises among fee-for-service providers. First, and most directly affected, providers in areas with major outbreaks have suffered extreme personal hardship and risked infection themselves with inadequate equipment and protective gear when treating patients. Second, everywhere in the country, physician practices and hospitals have seen revenue drops from 20 percent to 60 percent due to the need to follow social distancing practices to minimize infection. This revenue collapse has perversely resulted in staffing reductions that are likely to accelerate unless Congress provides further assistance to the industry. Third, and only partially observed so far, there is a pending “second wave” of health crises discernible in the “missing heart attacks” and reports from nephrologists and oncologists of patients making difficult decisions about whether to continue necessary care. In some cases, emergency care has shifted out of the hospital, and some triage is conducted on the street to avoid risk of COVID-19 infection.

The COVID-19 public health emergency has generated a massive set of emergency changes in Medicare payment policy, loosening regulation of acute hospital care, dramatically expanding use cases for telehealth and other types of virtual care, and, through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and subsequent relief legislation, releasing a $175 billion pool of money that attempts to prop up Medicare providers dependent on in-person, fee-for-service revenue. Now, with that first batch of changes handled, a debate has started among proponents of value-based purchasing as to the appropriate direction for the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) and other value-based initiatives during the emergency.

In this context, a number of stakeholders have begun to call on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to modify existing MSSP parameters to maintain the program through the emergency. CMS has responded by eliminating downside risk for accountable care organizations (ACOs) for the duration of the public health emergency and taking COVID-19 costs out of ACO financial calculations. These are welcome changes but don’t completely address the serious problems ACO participants face. We urge a different focus—the federal government should charge these existing networks with addressing the “second wave” of health care needs going largely unaddressed, as patients with serious, non-COVID-19-related chronic conditions see procedures and visits postponed indefinitely. Commensurately, Congress should suspend all financial impacts from the MSSP for the duration of the public health emergency—and consider excluding any data from 2020 for performance years 2021 and beyond. We describe key elements of these changes in this post.

A Growing Call For MSSP Modifications

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) issued a comment letter urging CMS to allow ACO providers to focus on COVID-19, rather than shared savings. MedPAC, acknowledging the dramatic shifts in care delivery necessitated by the COVID-19 crisis, made several recommendations about treatment of savings and losses in the MSSP for 2020. MedPAC asked CMS not to use 2020 data for purposes of ACO quality, bonuses, and penalties. MedPAC would also have CMS disregard 2020 claims when assigning beneficiaries to ACOs, since a shift to telehealth, with physicians and patients potentially located far apart, could distort the ACO assignment with unintended effects. Finally, MedPAC recommended extending all ACO agreement periods, keeping everyone in the current risk arrangement for one year, a recommendation CMS adopted.

William Bleser and colleagues recently suggested immediate and short-term actions that could help preserve ACOs through this crisis. Their blog post identifies the decision point, coming on June 30, 2020, for ACOs to stay in the program and be accountable for losses in 2020. The impact of the emergency on ACOs will still be unclear at that time, and the authors recommend that CMS allow ACOs to completely opt out of downside risk for 2020 while accepting a capped amount of potential shared savings. Eliminating the downside and offering a limited upside might just convince ACOs not to leave the program entirely. CMS has taken these concerns seriously and removed all COVID-19–related costs from ACO financial calculations and eliminated shared losses during the public health emergency.  

Another recent blog post by Travis Broome and Farzad Mostashari makes the case that the population health focus and financial incentives for ACOs position them uniquely, not just to survive, but to lead the way for primary care during the COVID-19 crisis. ACO participation may protect these practices because of the program’s unique financial metrics. Unlike Medicare managed care, MSSP ACOs are measured against a benchmark that trends forward at actual regional and national spending growth rates. During an unusual spending year, as 2020 is sure to be, those factors are included in the trend, and the ACO is not heavily penalized for the spending pattern. Broome and Mostashari recommend that CMS focus on shielding primary care practices from certain quality reporting and information collection requirements to pave the way for high-quality care and solid financial performance.

A More Focused Re-Envisioning Of The MSSP

Foundational to the MSSP is an agreement between groups of providers and the federal government to align their financial relationship with patient and taxpayer goals: to improve the quality of care for their patients and reduce the growth of health care spending. Both of those elements must take a back seat during a massive public health emergency.

Reducing overall health care costs is not an appropriate consideration for providers today. Even though national and regional growth factors will track actual changes in expenditures and may allow for identification of more efficient providers, this objective is second order to directly responding to the threat of the emergency. Given the overwhelming need to respond to the COVID-19 crisis in their communities, the ability of any health system or ACO to influence costs this year is likely to be dwarfed by factors outside its control. This type of highly infectious, novel pandemic is a risk that can only be properly assumed by the federal government. Neither physician practices, nor hospitals, nor any other ACO participants can realistically budget and prepare for such an event on their own. Congress and CMS should adopt MedPAC’s suggestion to suspend charging penalties or paying bonuses for all of 2020, no matter how long the public health emergency is in effect.

Similarly, while the prevention and care management metrics embedded in the MSSP remain appropriate indicators directionally, difficulties in seeing patients for well visits and new standards for documentation during telehealth visits will make any precise differentiation of quality in primary care practices near impossible. MedPAC is correct that using 2020 data for performance evaluation would undercut the legitimacy of the program, and the commissioners are right to support the call to suspend the use of such data in establishing bonuses, penalties, and benchmarks in 2020 and beyond.

However, many practices have made significant investments in population health technology, staff, and training that remain as valuable as ever during this emergency. And the public has an interest in maintaining those staff and those skills, as the basis for a better health system in the future. All told, like much of the rest of the economy, putting the MSSP and other ACO arrangements “on ice” to allow providers to focus on near-term priorities would best serve the public interest. That includes delaying or freezing requirements to step up to higher-risk tracks in the Pathways to Success program, as well as delaying or canceling quality submission requirements. These delays, however, should be paired with public funding to reflect the work that ACOs have already undertaken, as well as work that they can do to help manage through the crisis, discussed further below.

Taking steps to preserve ACOs through 2020 is a good start, but we believe Congress and CMS should think bigger and empower ACOs to focus directly on the current crisis for the next two years.

Adapting ACOs To Serve The Current Emergency

ACOs are a valuable asset for the Medicare program, reflecting nearly 10 years of work across hundreds of thousands of providers serving tens of millions of beneficiaries. Disbanding them by indifference would be a mistake. The current collapse in fee-for-service volume is a problem of fee-for-service medicine primarily, and ACOs represent an infrastructure for a further step away from volume-focused medicine once the danger from this emergency passes.

Suspending financial considerations and consequences for the duration of the emergency is insufficient. Without the responsibility for managing risk and sharing in any savings, the ACO contract with CMS loses its organizing force, and the program becomes “a solution in search of a problem.”

We see two opportunities for ACOs to redirect their energies productively this year and next. First, ACOs should be directed to follow best practices in testing and public health data collection, in collaboration with local and state officials. Managing the spread of the virus in their communities is already a daily task for these providers; additional surveillance and data collection could be adopted and updated continuously as recommendations evolve. By providing resources to ACOs to support this work directly, CMS would help ensure providers can keep up.

Second, and perhaps more important in most of the country to date, ACOs should be charged with meeting explicit virtual care management requirements to identify, contact, and serve patients in their panel with multiple high-risk chronic diseases. These patients are underserved today, and efforts to address their needs are piecemeal. In place of the current financial incentives, we propose that CMS require ACOs to perform a variety of care management and COVID-19 surveillance functions in exchange for a care management fee. Congress could enable and CMS could specify that ACOs place 10 percent to 15 percent of their patients under virtual care management programs, for example, and require that ACOs maintain regular contact with these patients as well as others at higher risk. The 10 percent to 10 percent figure is a fairly low bar, considering that more than 60 percent of Medicare patients have multiple chronic conditions, according to CMS. Additionally, COVID-19 patients could be offered principal care management, a new service for Medicare beneficiaries with one serious health condition, for a month or more after their diagnosis. New flexibilities for remote patient monitoring and virtual care make this far easier to implement than it had been before the pandemic.

CMS could quickly adapt existing financial models to support this work, drawing from analysis and design of the Primary Care First, Comprehensive Primary Care Plus, and other care management programs. ACOs are by design collaborative and can rapidly learn and share best practices for establishing virtual care management services. Behavioral health services and outreach, as well as other valuable preventive care, could also be directly funded through this structure. As an alternative to the fee for care management and surveillance, Congress could allow ACOs to receive their 2019 shared savings amounts again for 2020, for ACOs continuously operating in each year.

Looking Ahead

The steps we have outlined here will accomplish several worthwhile ends in this crisis:

  • directly funding primary care capacity at a time when volumes are nosediving;
  • keeping the nearly 500,000 physician and other clinicians already in ACOs working together, maintaining the infrastructure that has already been built; and
  • providing upfront resources to manage patients whose conditions could deteriorate in the coming months, potentially catching them before they do.

These modifications should be executed first by Congress, not CMS, to ensure that such changes to the program do not become commonplace. This would invigorate the ACO programs by focusing them on the unique set of problems of this crisis, unencumbered by requirements better suited to peacetime than wartime. And when the war is over, these organizations can resume their longer-term mission to manage total costs and quality with all of the new tools and capabilities they have acquired during the crisis.

 

 

 

 

CommonSpirit posts $1.4B loss, says full COVID-19 impact unknown

Posted on by • Posted in Coronavirus, Credit Quality, Credit Ratings, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Elective Procedures, Elective Surgery, Employee Furlough, Employee Hiring Freeze, Employee Layoffs, Employee Pay Cuts, Employee Protections, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Market Consolidation, Market Power, Market Share, Net Income, Operating Expenses, Operating Income, Operating Margin, Operating Performance, Operating Revenue, Pandemic, Paycheck Protection Program, The CARES Act, Uncertainty • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/commonspirit-posts-14b-loss-too-soon-to-project-long-term-covid-19-impac/578100/

Locations | CommonSpirit Health

Dive Brief:

  • CommonSpirit Health, sprung from last year’s merger of California-based Dignity Health and Colorado-based Catholic Health Initiatives, reported a loss topping $1.4 billion in the fiscal third quarter ending March 31, although adjusted revenues were flat compared to the third quarter of 2019. The biggest proportion of losses were tied to investments, as its portfolio dropped in value by nearly $1.1 billion. Its total net assets are down nearly $2.5 billion from a year ago.
  • Like many other hospital systems, CommonSpirit reported a drop in patient volumes that began in mid-March as states began issuing lockdown orders. Acute admissions dropped more than 5% for the quarter compared to a year ago.
  • CommonSpirit did receive more than $700 million in Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act funds, although since it was received on March 31 it will be booked into its fiscal fourth quarter financial statements. The system received another $2.6 billion in accelerated payments from CMS and anticipates receiving another $410 million in disaster relief funding and from the Paycheck Protection Program.​

Dive Insight:

The COVID-19 pandemic is continuing to ravage the bottom lines of providers, and the nation’s largest not-for-profit hospital system, CommonSpirit Health, is no exception.

Its first full year as a unified system is 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic is challenging the 134-hospital organization in ways it likely never anticipated. Admissions are down for the foreseeable future, coupled with the need to spend tens of millions of dollars on personal protective equipment, respirators and to divert a significant amount of resources toward treating coronavirus patients.

Fitch Ratings said COVID-19 is to blame for the worst second quarter for most U.S. hospitals and systems.

For the third quarter of 2020, CommonSpirit reported an operating loss of $145 million, compared to a pro forma $124 million loss reported by Dignity and CHI for the first quarter of 2019.

CommonSpirit posted a net loss of $1.4 billion for the third quarter, compared to a pro forma net gain of $9.7 billion for the third quarter of 2019. However, $9.2 billion of that came from what CommonSpirit termed a “contribution from business combination,” the net assets received from both parties by merging with one another. For the first nine months of fiscal 2020, CommonSpirit lost $1.1 billion on revenue of $22.4 billion, compared to a net gain of $9.5 billion on revenue of $21.6 billion over the same period in fiscal 2019.

And despite receiving some $3.7 billion in federal assistance, CommonSpirit said in its quarterly financial disclosures that it remains too soon to tell what the impact of COVID-19 will be on the organization over the long-term.

Prior to the pandemic, CommonSpirit’s financial position was trending stronger compared to its pre-merger state. Seven of its 14 operating divisions reported a jump in revenue during the quarter compared to 2019.