Here’s a number that should get the attention of our audience: $166 million. That’s how much the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG) says one hospital may have been overpaid from the COVID Provider Relief Fund.
Part of the reason is that somewhere in the process, $755 million in quarterly revenue apparently became $157,000. Let me explain.
Last week, HHS-OIG released a report on the COVID-era Provider Relief Fund program, which was designed to keep healthcare providers afloat as lockdowns caused non-emergency healthcare utilization to plummet. The last phase of the program paid out about $19.3 billion to roughly 64,000 providers.
Each payment to a provider under the program was calculated as the greater of 2 percent of the provider’s patient care revenue or 88 percent of its reported COVID losses. The figures those calculations were based on were generally self-reported.
For the audit, OIG pulled a random sample of 150 providers. Every one of them was eligible under the Provider Relief Fund Program. But 65, or over 43 percent of the sampled providers, received payments that were miscalculated, and 39 (or 26 percent of the sampled providers) were potentially overpaid – by a whopping $655 million.
Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the agency that administered the program, received more than 100,000 applications for provider relief funds. For about 95 percent of them, no humans reviewed the supporting...
Here’s a number that should get the attention of our audience: $166 million. That’s how much the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG) says one hospita...