American Hospital Association Says Members Could Lose $122 Billion This Year

U.S. hospitals are set to lose as much as $122 billion in revenue this year as a side effect of the pandemic, Bloomberg reported.

The losses come from people not coming in for elective procedures during the pandemic, along with hospitals with fewer privately insured patients, according to the report. Meanwhile, safety and treatment costs have soared as they’ve seen a 14 percent rise in labor and 17 percent rise in drug purchases.

Bloomberg reported that the best-case scenario would still be a loss of around $53 billion, citing a report by Kaufman, Hall & Associates for the American Hospital Association.

The recovery will come with the pace of the vaccine rollouts, and whether the more infectious new COVID-19 strains cause more of a flood of cases, along with whether potential patients are cautious or willing to return for both elective procedures and emergencies, according to Bloomberg.

The report from Kaufman, Hall & Associates also noted that hospitals were on thin margins even before the pandemic, with a median of 2.5 percent in 2019, Bloomberg reported.

“The impact of any type of additional losses is significant for most organizations,” said a senior managing director at FTI Consulting, Lisa O’Connor, who specializes in healthcare, according to Bloomberg.

Hospitals have also had to contend with a spate of cyberattacks, PYMNTS reported, with experts saying this has been “the most significant cybersecurity threat” ever seen in the U.S. as of last fall.

It began as the antibody trials were starting last November. On some days, the amount of attack attempts on Great Plains Health, based in Nebraska, for example, hit as much as 70,000 — a drastic increase from the usual 10,000 attempts to access the servers, workers there said.

The culprits were a variety of different types of scammers, including ransomware gangs, financial scammers and hackers backed by nation-states. Some of the difficulty has come from the number of people working from home, and the number of variables like vaccines and COVID-19 testing have made ripe targets for scammers.