Essential hospitals share a mission to care for all people, regardless of their financial means and insurance status. Three-quarters of essential hospitals’ patients are uninsured or have Medicaid or Medicare coverage. Marginalized and underrepresented populations and communities with systemic and structural barriers to care rely on essential hospitals for health and wellness.

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; meet public health and crisis response needs; and advance health equity.

Learn now 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, improve health equity, 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 2023: 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

• Essential hospitals provided provided 25.2 percent of all charity care nationally, or about $6.4 billion.
• Served communities in which 14.6 million individuals live below the poverty line, 5.4 million struggle with food insecurity, and nearly three-quarters were uninsured or covered by Medicaid or Medicare.
• Essential hospitals continue to have average operating margins far below the rest of the hospital industry. The aggregate operating margin for members in 2021 was −8.6 percent, compared with −1.4 percent for all hospitals nationwide. Without Medicaid disproportionate share hospital (DSH) payments, aggregate member operating margins would drop to −13 percent.

Community Cornerstones

• In 2021, members of America’s Essential Hospitals provided nonemergency outpatient care to 88.4 million patients and treated 12.6 million patients in their emergency departments. They averaged nearly 17,000 inpatient discharges per hospital — 2.6 times more than the inpatient volume of other acute-care hospitals nationwide.
• Essential hospitals trained an average of 246 physicians (defined as U.S. medical and dental residents) per hospital, more than three times as many as those trained at other U.S. teaching hospitals.
• Essential hospitals accounted for nearly a third of the nation’s level I trauma centers, about 45 percent of burn care beds, and more than a quarter of all pediatric intensive care beds.
• The average essential hospital employed 3,712 people. Together, the association’s members accounted for 682,922 jobs nationwide and had an estimated impact on state economies of more than $322 billion.

Building Healthy Communities

• 74 percent of essential hospitals participate in a state initiative to address the social determinants of health.
• 98 percent of essential hospitals have a relationship with their local heath department.
• Essential hospitals were the site of more than 372,000 births in 2021.

For media inquiries, contact Carl Graziano, senior director of communications, at cgraziano@essentialhospitals.org or 202.585.0102.