Uncompensated Care and the Impact of Affordable Care Act (ACA) on it

Uncompensated Care Essay
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Uncompensated care has proved to be a burden for the United States (U.S.) safety-net healthcare organizations. This paper defines uncompensated care and safety-net hospitals and discusses how the former impacts the latter. It also delineates the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on uncompensated care and makes policy suggestions to mitigate the potential for uncompensated care.
What is uncompensated care?
Uncompensated care is the unreimbursed or free healthcare services offered by healthcare organizations and other medical care providers. It is the measure of a healthcare organization’s care offered to a patient without making any payment. The healthcare organization’s financial performance is linked to uncompensated care-associated costs and could be hostile regarding reduced profitability and revenue-generation capability (Glover, 2019). This, by extension, is detrimental to the quality of the healthcare services that the hospital delivers (Camilleri & Diebold, 2019).
What are safety-net hospitals and how have they been impacted by uncompensated care?
Safety-net hospitals are healthcare organizations that offer care to vulnerable and low-income populations, including Medicaid beneficiaries and those that are uninsured. Following the enactment of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to expand coverage, approximately 27 million Americans remained uninsured, and others underinsured. In this context, safety-net hospitals are central in offering emergency, ambulatory, and inpatient services. Uncompensated care increases pressure on safety-net hospitals, putting them at significant risk of shutdown or privatizing, and undermines their ability to achieve the needs of their communities. It is increasingly challenging for the safety-net entity to thwart their uncompensated care-associated losses (Khullar et al., 2018). As a result, there have been many incidents of these hospitals filing for bankruptcy, merging, or closing because of the irreversible losses. Hospitals have been unable to remain sustainable because of the losses associated with serving the underinsured and uninsured populations leading to takeover. Safety-net facilities are significantly burdened by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) in that they are obligated by law to offer health screening examination to any individual who visits the emergency unit and requests the examination and obligated hospitals to provide the subsequent treatm...