2018‐23 Profitability of Rural and Urban Hospitals by Medicare Payment Designation
The NC Rural Health Research Program has been tracking profitability of rural hospitals more than a decade. In a 2020 study, we found that: overall, profitability of rural hospitals decreased while the profitability of urban hospitals increased between 2016 and 2018. Since our 2020 study was published, the global COVID-19 pandemic emerged, and the federal government provided Public Health Emergency (PHE) funds to hospitals. For this study we considered it important to clearly separate study years without PHE funds (before COVID-19 years) and study years with PHE funds (after COVID-19 years). Therefore, using hospital cost report data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), we compared profitability (total margin) of three types of hospitals in both urban and rural locations: Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs), Prospective Payment System-only (PPS) hospitals by number of acute beds, and PPS hospitals with special payment designations for over a five-year period consisting of two years before and three years after COVID-19.
To read the brief, download 2018‐23 Profitability of Rural and Urban Hospitals by Medicare Payment Designation