While hospitals and health systems in general continue to move closer to their pre-pandemic level of financial performance, they now face challenges that threaten to undermine that progress.

While they have slowly gotten their labor costs under control, providers now face rising non-labor costs, including for drugs and supplies.

Meanwhile, two recent policies enacted by Congress may pose an even greater threat.  New limits on Medicaid eligibility threaten to transform manageable losses from under-reimbursement for Medicaid services into uncompensated care at the same time that the elimination of enhanced Affordable Care Act insurance premium subsidies could turn lower-income working families into uninsured families by making barely affordable health insurance totally unaffordable.

The recent adoption of these policies by Congress could prove especially troublesome for community safety-net hospitals because they serve more low-income patients than most American hospitals and consequently face the prospect of losing both more Medicaid patients and more commercially insured patients than other hospitals.

Learn more about the progress hospitals and health systems have made toward returning to their pre-pandemic level of financial performance and the emerging forces that threaten that progress from the Becker’s Hospital Review article “Hospitals’ margin recovery faces major setbacks.”