Anuj Gangopadhyaya (
Fredric Blavin, Urban Institute, Washington, D.C.
Health Aff (Millwood). 2023 Aug;42(8):1100-1109. doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.2022.01411.
To help mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic's financial effects on health care providers, Congress allocated $178 billion to the Provider Relief Fund (PRF) beginning in 2020. Using monthly data from January 2018 through June 2022 from a nationally representative sample of US hospitals, we used a difference-in-differences approach to examine whether hospitals receiving medium and high PRF support intensity had higher average monthly operating margins (measured separately with and without accounting for PRF payments) than those that received low PRF support intensity. We also assessed the impact of PRF payments by hospitals' prepandemic financial vulnerability status, measured by whether their average operating margins in 2018 and 2019 were above or below the national median. Our findings indicate that PRF distributions to hospitals were appropriately targeted and did not make some hospitals significantly more profitable than others; rather, PRF payments helped offset financial losses associated with the pandemic. The effects of PRF support intensity were concentrated among hospitals that were financially vulnerable before the pandemic and thus in need of support to remain financially viable during the crisis.
为帮助减轻 COVID-19 大流行对医疗保健提供者的财务影响，国会从 2020 年起向 Provider Relief Fund（PRF）拨款 1780 亿美元。本研究使用来自全美代表性医院样本的 2018 年 1 月至 2022 年 6 月的月度数据，采用差异中的差异方法，检验接受中高 PRF 支持强度的医院是否比接受低 PRF 支持强度的医院具有更高的平均月度运营利润率（分别在考虑和不考虑 PRF 支付的情况下进行衡量）。我们还评估了 PRF 支付对医院大流行前财务脆弱性状况的影响，这一状况通过其 2018 年和 2019 年的平均运营利润率是否高于或低于全国中位数来衡量。我们的研究结果表明，PRF 向医院的分配目标明确，并未使某些医院的盈利能力明显高于其他医院；相反，PRF 支付有助于抵消与大流行相关的财务损失。PRF 支持强度的影响主要集中在大流行前财务脆弱的医院，因此需要支持以在危机期间保持财务生存能力。
