Dive Brief:
- With more than one-quarter of hospitals in the Pittsburgh area closing between 2000 and 2010—11 out of 39—the amount of charitable care available to the poor has fallen drastically.
- For example, three now-closed Catholic institutions were once the largest providers of uncompensated care in the region. St. Francis Medical Center provided three times the area's average percentage of uncompensated care in 2002, its last year of operation.
- Today, things have shifted. While UPMC Mercy put nearly 5% of patient revenues into uncompensated care last year, the city's other five hospitals plow less than half that percentage of revenues into uncompensated care.
Dive Insight:
While most Pittsburgh-area hospitals say they will provide free care to patients with incomes up to 200% of the federal poverty level, and discounted care on a sliding scale for patients with incomes up to 400%, that doesn't seem to be meeting residents' needs. Free clinics and federally-qualified health centers are struggling to fill the gap left by the loss of charitable hospitals and doctors, despite their number increasing dramatically over the last few decades.
Meanwhile, many hospitals in the region do as little as possible to let patients know that charity care might be available, in part by failing to provide notice on their websites or within their facilities—passively if not actively discouraging the poor from seeking help at their facilities. This, too, has increased the burden on free and federally-qualified clinics for the poor and uninsured. It seems that the area's safety net for the poor may fail completely if something isn't done to spread the burden of care more equally.