How much Philadelphia-area hospitals are getting in federal money for treating coronavirus patients

Temple University Hospital received $50 million in the latest round of relief funds under the federal coronavirus economic rescue package, twice as much as it received in last month’s first round of aid to hospitals and other medical providers nationwide.

The difference? The $12 billion distributed last week is for 395 hospitals that treated 100 or more coronavirus inpatients through April 10 — 70% of the U.S. total through that date, the federal Department of Health and Human Services said.

Last month, when the department distributed $30 billion, the money was divided among thousands of providers based on traditional Medicare billings, a methodology that was widely criticized because it did not take into account how hard hospitals were hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

The $50 million grant to Temple, which has said it is losing $40 million a month because of lost revenue from nonurgent care and pandemic costs, was the largest of the 18 awarded to hospitals in the Philadelphia region. Cooper University Hospital’s $39.2 million grant was the second-largest in the region.

U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans (D., Phila.) said Monday that he was glad to see more money going to such places as Temple and Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia in the new awards. “We do not have a public system, so these hospitals that are highly impacted, we have to protect them,” said Evans, who is a member of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Health.

Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia — which expects to lose $70 million from March through June — received $25 million in the new round, compared with $10.21 million based on its Medicare fee-for-service billings.

Among Philadelphia-area hospitals, the biggest discrepancy in the two rounds of funding was at Holy Redeemer Hospital & Medical Center in Meadowbrook. When federal regulators took its COVID-19 patient load into account, it received $19.38 million, four times more than it received last month.

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Comparisons were not possible for all of the 18 Philadelphia-area hospitals that received a slice of the $12 billion. Five Jefferson Health hospitals — led by Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Center City with $30 million — received a combined total of $101 million last week. The amounts of the earlier aid to those hospital were included in the lasted data available on the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Jefferson did not respond Monday to a request for the amounts of the grants announced last month.

Main Line Health’s Lankenau Medical Center and two Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic hospitals were also among those hardest hit with COVID-19 patients, but comparable data for last month’s grants were not available.

Even hospitals without large numbers of COVID-19 patients have contended with financial fallout from the pandemic because they’ve had to suspend many of their normal services. But the distribution differences between the two rounds of funding are dramatic on a state level.

New Jersey received 3% of last month’s distribution, or $919.4 million, but 14%, or $1.7 billion, of the money awarded last week. It was even more extreme in New York, where the distribution went from 6%, or $1.9 billion, of the total to 42%, or $5 billion.

Pennsylvania’s share went down on a percentage basis, falling from 4%, or $1.2 billion, to 2.7%, or $323.6 million, as large areas of the state have relatively few confirmed cases.

Under last week’s grants, hospitals received $76,975 per admission plus more money if they treat a large number of uninsured and Medicaid patients. The 395 hospitals treated 129,911 of the 184,037 COVID-19 inpatients reported to Health and Human Services as part of the grant program. There are nearly 6,000 hospitals nationwide.