Disproportionate share hospital

The United States government provides funding to hospitals that treat indigent patients through the Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) programs, under which facilities are able to receive at least partial compensation.

Although 3,109 hospitals receive this adjustment, Medicare DSH payments are highly concentrated. Ninety-three percent of total DSH payments go to large hospitals in urban areas, and teaching hospitals receive about 65 percent of all DSH payments. Additionally, because Medicaid eligibility and coverage vary widely across states, Medicare DSH payments are distributed unevenly across geographic areas: the Middle Atlantic, South Atlantic, and Pacific regions account for 60 percent of all DSH payments but only 46 percent of Medicare discharges.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act aims to reduce:

PPACA requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to:

A hospital can qualify for the Medicare DSH adjustment by using one of the following methods:

The formulas to establish a hospital’s Medicare DSH payment adjustment are based on the following: hospital’s location; number of beds; and status as a Rural Referral Centers, Medicare-Dependent Hospitals, or sole community provider.

The value of the hospital’s DSH "index" determines the hospital’s eligibility for a DSH payment and the size of the payment. The index, whose definition has not changed since the original legislation, is the sum of two ratios: the proportion of all Medicare days that are attributable to beneficiaries of Supplemental Security Income, a means-tested cash benefit program for aged and disabled people, and the proportion of all patient days for which Medicaid is the primary payer.

In 1989, some enterprising state budget experts discovered that they could claim federal DSH funds without expending general state funds and use the DSH payment as a mechanism for mitigating hospitals’ financial distress. To earn the match, however, the state had to spend the tax or donation revenues, because the federal Medicaid match is based on expenditures, not revenues. The Medicaid DSH payment provided the mechanism to spend these revenues. The DSH payment was singled out because it was not subject to the Medicare upper payment limit. Thus, states could make virtually unlimited DSH payments and, in the process, earn federal matching dollars. As such the hospitals that were slated to receive DSH funds were asked to contribute the required state share; the state would then use this money to draw down a large federal matching payment. The hospitals would get their contributions back and perhaps a bit more, but the states often kept the lion's share of the federal payment. With the DSH system effectively serving as a money pump that pulled federal funds into state coffers, the program experienced explosive growth. Between 1990 and 1996, federal DSH payments ballooned from $1.4 billion to more than $15 billion annually.

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