Hospital Uncompensated Care: Federal Action Needed to Better Align Payments with Costs, GAO-16-568: Published: Jun 30, 2016. Publicly Released: Aug 1, 2016: “Key sources of federal support for hospitals incurring costs for services provided to uninsured and other low-income individuals (uncompensated care costs) include multiple types of Medicaid and Medicare payments totaling about $50 billion annually. GAO’s analysis shows that through Medicaid, a joint federal-state program for low-income individuals, states made three types of payments that helped offset uncompensated care in fiscal years 2013 and 2014 totaling over $35 billion annually. Medicare, a federal program for aged and certain disabled individuals, made two types of payments in 2013 and three in 2014—including a new type called Medicare Uncompensated Care (UC) payments—totaling over $14 billion annually. Federal tax law also provides tax benefits—estimated by researchers to be billions of dollars annually—to tax-exempt nonprofit hospitals that incur uncompensated care costs. The basis for determining these different types of Medicaid and Medicare payments varies somewhat by type of payment. As shown in the table, however, the payment types are based on similar factors—generally hospitals’ costs or workloads related to providing services to Medicaid, uninsured, or low-income Medicare patients, or some combination of these…”