02.19.21
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Pause for a moment and step back. Step back from COVID-19, and the year of frenetic and sometimes chaotic activity to prepare, respond and begin to recover. Step back from the immediate, middle and long-term challenges of transitioning back to operational normality. We don’t need to go far — let’s just step back to 2019.
Thursday, MHA released the 2021 Community Investment Report. The data are, by necessity, not real-time. This year’s report represents hospitals’ costs and investments from 2019. As a result, they do not include the significant influence we can expect in future years as COVID-19 is represented in the report.
Here are the toplines. In 2019, hospitals provided $1.7 billion in total uncompensated care — an increase of more than $200 million over 2018. More than 85% of year-to-year growth in uncompensated care was provided as charity care. For the first time, charity care exceeded $1 billion. This year’s total was a 17% increase over 2018. At the same time, bad debt increased by more than $34 million to nearly $693 million.
Uncompensated care only is one aspect of community benefit. Hospitals also absorb the unpaid costs of Medicare and Medicaid, help educate and train the health care workforce, and donate to local causes. When combined with uncompensated care, hospitals’ total community benefit was more than $3.4 billion in 2019.
There’s additional benefit and it is significant. In 2019, Missouri’s hospitals employed nearly 170,000 workers and invested nearly $1.7 billion in various capital improvement projects in their communities. Hospitals and health systems often are the largest employer in the communities they serve, which provides an economic foundation. Payroll and capital investments ripple throughout the economy, creating household income, opportunities to support and build businesses, and revenue for state and local governments.
All of this is noteworthy. The work hospitals do — day in and day out — improves individual and community health, while strengthening economic health locally, regionally and statewide.
Now, let’s step forward to today.
Next year’s report, and those in the future, may be quite different from this week’s release. The numbers that reflected hospitals’ mission focus in 2019 could change significantly or minimally. We simply can’t know.
There are some things we can know. We can know that fewer Missourians take for granted the importance of a strong, accessible health care system. We can know that, despite significant hardships and a brutal learning curve, we have saved countless lives — and are working to save and protect more every day.
Let me leave you with this. This week’s report is a powerful demonstration that hospitals were, in 2019, as good as their missions.
The pandemic has shifted our emphasis and has clarified it as well. For Missourians, it has brought the essence of hospitals’ work — from the bedside to the boardroom — into sharper relief.
COVID-19 has exposed the essential nature of hospitals. Anyone who is looking can see it, regardless of their perspective.
The full report is available on MHA’s website. Hospital-specific community benefit and community investment data are available — as are updated price and quality data — on www.focusonhospitals.com.
Let me know what you’re thinking.
Herb B. Kuhn
MHA President and CEO
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