“Large Swath” Of Health System Infrastructure That Serves Medicaid Population Left Out Of COVID-19 Relief Funding
- May 18, 2020
NPR (5/18, Rovner) reports that “in March, Congress authorized $100 billion for health care providers to compensate them both for the extra costs associated with caring for COVID-19 patients and for the revenue that’s not coming in because of interruptions in the usual sorts of care they provide.” However, “more than half that money has been allocated by the Department of Health and Human Services, and the majority of it so far has gone to hospitals, doctors and other facilities that serve Medicare patients.” Authorities “said at the time that this was an efficient way to get the money beginning to move to large numbers of providers. That approach, however, has left out a large swath of the health system infrastructure that serves the low-income Medicaid population and children.”