Hospitals in COVID-19 Hot Spots to Receive $10B in Relief Funds

Hospitals in COVID-19 hot spots will receive another $10 billion in coronavirus relief funds starting this week, HHS recently announced.

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The announcement released on Friday stated that the department, through the Health Resource and Services Administration (HRSA), will begin distributing a second round of high impact COVID-19 area funding to hospitals. The funding will be based on data hospitals were asked to submit to HHS on COVID-19 positive inpatient admissions from January 1, 2020, through June 10, 2020.

According to the announcement, HHS will determine how much the “hot spot” hospitals will receive based on a formula for hospitals with over 161 COVID-19 admissions during the period, or one admission per day.

Hospitals that reported a disproportionate intensity of COVID-19 admissions through June 10, 2020, will also be considered for the additional coronavirus relief funding.

Hospitals will be paid $50,000 per eligible admission, per the HHS announcement.

“The top priority for HHS’s administration of the Provider Relief Fund has been getting support as quickly as possible to providers who have been hit hard by COVID-19,” HHS Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement. “Because we’ve carefully targeted support, we can make payments to areas most in need as the pandemic evolves, like we are doing with this round of funds.”

Nearly 400 hospitals have already received special targeted funding from HHS for being located in COVID-19 hot spots. The funding released in May 2020 provided a total of $12 billion to the hospitals.

The second wave of targeted coronavirus relief funding is expected to impact more than 1,000 hospitals across the country and will bring the total committed payments from the Provider Relief Fund program to over $20 billion, to date. The targeted funding will represent almost 12 percent of the entire $175 billion program, HHS reported.

Congress allocated the $175 billion to the Provider Relief Fund program through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and subsequent coronavirus relief legislation. The program included $50 billion in general distribution payments, as well as special allocations to hospitals in rural areas, treating higher volumes of Medicaid patients, and in COVID-19 hot spots.

Hospitals have been calling for more targeted coronavirus relief funding after the establishment of the Provider Relief Fund earlier this year.

General distribution of Provider Relief Fund payments had favored hospitals with the highest share of private payer revenue and those with larger operating margins, according to a May 2020 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Meanwhile, hospitals are poised to lose at least $323 billion through the end of 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the American Hospital Association (AHA) recently estimated.

Targeting coronavirus relief funding to hospitals in COVID-19 hot spots is one way stakeholders believe the government can support providers struggling to with persistent funding shortages made worse by COVID-19.

“As we have urged, hospitals with high numbers of COVID-19 admissions need help immediately to help offset the significant costs incurred in treating COVID patients, along with managing financial losses due to lower patient visits for non-COVID care,” Rick Pollack, AHA president and CEO, said in a statement on the distribution of additional funds to hot spot hospitals.

“However, since this distribution of funding for ‘hot spots’ does not take into account the latest spike in cases and hospitalizations in some parts of the country, we look forward to working with the Administration to ensure that additional relief will be distributed to ‘hot spots’ and all hospitals,” Pollack added.

New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California are among the states with the most number of hospitals slated to receive the second round of targeted coronavirus relief funding include, according to data from HHS.

Most of these states experienced significant surges in positive COVID-19 cases at the start of the pandemic but have since reported declines in new and total cases. Most recently, more states in the South and West experienced increases in positive COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, data from Johns Hopkins University showed.

Specifically, Florida, Arizona, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas have become the states with the highest COVID-19 risk levels, Harvard Global Health Institute reported at the time of this article’s publication.

Florida has 35 hospitals receiving $286,737,657 in funding from the second round of targeted coronavirus relief funding, while Arizona has 20 hospitals receiving $149,676,4990, Alabama 17 hospitals receiving $98,575,129, Louisiana 47 hospitals receiving $223,580,330, and Texas 44 hospitals receiving $377,927,710.