More than a year and a half after Congress approved funding to help health care providers weather the pandemic, billions of the $178 billion allocated remain unspent
- Collection:
- Health Policy and Services Research
- Series Title(s):
- U.S. health reform--monitoring and impact
- Author(s):
- Coughlin, Teresa A., author Ramos, Christal, author Samuel-Jakubos, Haley, author
- Contributor(s):
- Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, issuing body. Urban Institute, issuing body.
- Publication:
- Washington, DC : Urban Institute, October 2021
- Language(s):
- English
- Format:
- Text
- Subject(s):
- COVID-19 -- economics Health Expenditures -- statistics & numerical data United States
- Genre(s):
- Technical Report
- Abstract:
- Since March 2020, Congress has allocated $178 billion to the COVID-19 Provider Relief Fund. Established under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, the fund was meant to help providers “prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus” and to “reimburse…eligible health care providers for health care related expenses or lost revenues that are attributable to coronavirus.” Passed in March 2020, the CARES Act allocated $100 billion for the fund. This was followed by $75 billion in the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act, passed a month after the CARES Act, and an additional $3 billion from the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021. Unlike some other pandemic health care relief efforts, provider relief funds are grants and do not have to be repaid so long as providers meet the fund’s terms and conditions. From the outset, the fund has faced sharp criticism. Early on, stakeholders were concerned that the fund’s eligibility criteria systematically disadvantaged providers who were already under-resourced, especially safety net hospitals on the front line of the pandemic response. More recently, congressional lawmakers have raised concerns that some hospitals and health systems have used fund grants to help finance mergers, rather than using the money to care for patients. In this brief, we use the most recent publicly available information to update our earlier work and review how fund grants have been allocated into general and targeted distributions and paid to providers meeting the specified criteria. We find that more than a year and a half after Congress first approved provider relief funding, billions of fund dollars have yet to be spent. Specifically, we estimate $7.1 billion remains unallocated as of October 2021 (figure 1). As of May 31, 2021 (the latest publicly available data), another $19.7 billion had been allocated to a particular distribution category but had yet to be disbursed to eligible providers, including $8 billion in grants that providers had returned (GAO 2021c). We estimate $26.8 billion remains in the fund as of October 2021. In addition, the fund balance will likely grow soon, because some providers will need to return unspent grants, as required under recent guidance issued by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). As of this writing, the US continues to face large numbers of COVID-19 cases. Given greater understanding of how providers have used (or returned) provider relief funds and improved knowledge about how to treat patients with COVID-19, policymakers have an opportunity to consider how best to target remaining relief funds to health care providers who were hardest hit by the pandemic and continue to have the greatest needs.
- Copyright:
- Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further use of the material is subject to CC BY-NC-DC license. (More information)
- Extent:
- 1 online resource (1 PDF file (16 pages))
- Illustrations:
- Illustrations
- NLM Unique ID:
- 9918299582006676 (See catalog record)
- Permanent Link:
- http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/9918299582006676