Medicare paid hospitals only 82 percent of what they spent caring for Medicare patients in 2022, according to a new analysis.

That amounted to a Medicare payment shortfall of nearly $100 billion.

Medicare payment shortfalls are especially challenging to community safety-net hospitals, for which public payers account for a far higher proportion of their revenue than they do for the typical American hospital.  Among those public payers, moreover, is Medicaid, which in most states is notorious for its underpayments to hospitals.

Learn more about these numbers, how they were calculated, and what they mean for hospitals and their Medicare patients from the American Hospital Association report “Medicare Significantly Underpays Hospitals for Cost of Patient Care.”