Tens of billions of dollars in pandemic aid for hospitals and nursing homes sits unused

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

Tens of billions of dollars in pandemic aid for hospitals and nursing homes sits unused

By Amy Goldstein
September 1, 2021 at 1:00 p.m. EDT

Tens of billions of dollars designated by Congress to help hospitals, nursing homes and other health-care providers stave off financial hardship from the coronavirus pandemic are sitting unused, because the Biden administration has not released the money.

As many hospitals bulge again with covid-19 patients, a wide swath of the health-care industry is exasperated that federal health officials have not made available any more of the aid since President Biden took office. About $44 billion from a Provider Relief Fund created last year remains unspent, along with $8.5 billion Congress allotted in March for medical care in rural areas.

With the coronavirus’s delta variant fueling a fourth pandemic surge, health-care institutions, lobbyists and lawmakers have ratcheted up complaints to senior Biden administration health officials, imploring them to decide how the money will be divided and when it will be distributed.

“There’s just no good reason for the administration to be sitting on these funds,” said Mark Parkinson, president and chief executive of the American Health Care Association, a trade group that represents nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. Many are running short on money, he said, because the virus’s heavy concentration in long-term-care centers early in the pandemic is still prompting potential patients and residents to stay away.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/hospitals-covid-need-money/2021/09/01/4a42bdb8-01c2-11ec-a664-4f6de3e17ff0_story.html

[msongs]

1. government aid is a shell game. much of it will disappear into various fraud schemes nt

[OhNo-Really]

2. The buried lead

“ When the Biden team arrived, the former Trump official said, they “they stopped work on Phase 4. . . . This was the tough part. We had made promises to all these people that . . . their phase was coming.”

And in the story it appears some hospitals returned $Millions.

Is it a stretch to suspect that the new HHS team is sifting through what Trump’s acting HHS directors did?

Can we suspect a giant pile of horse picky complicating release to viable resources?