“Hospitals and health systems that provide the bulk of care for society’s most vulnerable people, such as the uninsured and Medicaid recipients, face a daunting challenge: steep cuts to federal support for uncompensated care and millions more uninsured patients than first projected under health care reform. Recent reports have focused largely on these two data points, but a third – uncompensated care costs – also deserves attention. Using data from various nationally recognized sources, the National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems (NAPH) projects hospitals will see $53.3 billion more uncompensated care costs by 2019 than originally estimated when lawmakers approved the
Affordable Care Act (ACA). The following analysis describes the problem in detail and discusses policy implications.”