Members of America’s Essential Hospitals deliver high-quality care to all people, including those who otherwise face barriers to care.

Three-quarters of essential hospitals’ patients are uninsured or have Medicaid or Medicare coverage. Along with their safety net mission, essential hospitals provide specialized, lifesaving services, such as level I trauma and neonatal intensive care; train many physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals; coordinate care across large ambulatory networks; and meet public health and crisis response needs.

Learn how essential hospitals build a healthy country for all and take a deep dive into data about our hospitals and the people and communities they serve with our annual member characteristics report, Essential Data: Our Hospitals, Our Patients.

Why We Must Formally Recognize Essential Hospitals

To safeguard access to care and protect communities in times of greatest need, Congress must statutorily designate essential hospitals for targeted support. Essential hospitals face challenges unique to their mission. Our members represent about 5 percent of all U.S. hospitals but provide more than a quarter of the nation’s charity care. Essential hospitals, on average, provide five times as much uncompensated care as other hospitals. due to their small share of commercially insured patients and historically underfunded mission.

We have ample precedent for formally designating classes of hospitals to stabilize and protect providers vital to the larger health care ecosystem. Examples include critical access hospitals and sole community hospitals. Today, essential hospitals lack similar and crucial protections.

Key Facts about Our Members

Members of America’s Essential Hospitals provide state-of-the-art care to the uninsured, low-income, and other vulnerable people who might otherwise have no place to turn. In many communities, our members are the sole source of services that benefit all: trauma and burn care, neonatal intensive care, chronic condition management, health professionals training, research, public health functions and others.

Our members work daily to improve the health of individuals and promote the economic health of communities throughout the nation. The data points below come from Essential Data 2025: Our Hospitals, Our Patients.

Complex Patients

• Essential hospitals’ patients generally are sicker and more complex than those served at other hospitals nationwide.

Committed to Underserved Communities

• Provided 29 percent of all charity care nationally, or about $8.6 billion, despite representing only 6% of hospitals nationwide.
• Served communities in which 16 percent of individuals live below the poverty line, 2.7 million people are unemployed, and nearly three-quarters were uninsured or covered by Medicaid or Medicare.
• Continue to have average operating margins far below the rest of the hospital industry. The aggregate operating margin for members in 2023 was −7.1 percent, compared with −2.3 percent for all hospitals nationwide.

Community Cornerstones

• Account for nearly a third of the nation’s level I trauma centers and 43% of burn care beds.
• Employed more than 960,000 people nationally and drove more than $307 billion in state economic output.
• Essential hospitals trained an average of 193 physicians (defined as U.S. medical and dental residents) per hospital, nearly three times as many as those trained at other U.S. teaching hospitals.

Building Healthy Communities

• 96 percent of essential hospitals operate a food insecurity program.
• 77 percent of essential hospitals operate a housing insecurity program.
• 96 percent of essential hospitals have a relationship with their local heath department.

For media inquiries, contact media@essentialhospitals.org.