The Urban Institute releaseda brief examining the impact of the national health care reform law on hospitals. The brief found that hospitals will generate $40 billion in new revenue by 2019 because of the larger pool of insured individuals.  The authors also suggest that the payment reform policies and pilot programs within the law will reward hospitals that emphasize value of care over volume of patients.

From the report:

Given how many sectors make up the hospital industry, including nonprofit and for-profit community hospitals, teaching hospitals, and safety net hospitals, it is likely that the effects of reform will not be felt uniformly across all hospitals. Some types of hospitals have historically provided more care to uninsured patients, and these hospitals are likely to gain the most in terms of revenue increases for the mostly uncompensated care they have been providing to these patients. Analysis we have done based on results from an Urban Institute microsimulation model suggests that the roughly 30 million newly insured Americans would generate approximately $40 billion in new revenues for all hospitals by 2019.1 However, the coverage expansions were paid for, in part, by hospitals agreeing to accept slower growth in Medicare payment rates and to forgo certain special payments that have been made under Medicare and Medicaid to offset the costs of uncompensated care. The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) projections of the amount of these forgone revenues suggests that, as a group, hospitals will not be giving up very much more, if any, revenues than they will gain from newly insured patients.

Full report: How Will Hospitals Be Affected By Health Reform (PDF | 218.8 KB)

The Urban Institute. (2010). How will hospitals be affected by health reform? Berenson, R. and Zuckerman, S.