WASHINGTON (CN) — Ratcheting up its scrutiny of the federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic, House Republicans asked a Biden official to answer why billions of dollars in federal aid went to health care institutions that had no need of such assistance.
The letter sent Tuesday to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra comes four months after The Wall Street Journal reported that approximately 1,200 or so U.S. hospitals turned a collective profit of $53.6 billion while also collecting around $17 billion from a roughly $178 billion relief fund set up for hospitals in early 2020.
Signed by Congressman Jim Comer, who chairs the oversight committee, and fellow Republican Nick Langworthy, the letter notes that around 1,600 low-income hospitals reported a total loss of about $130 billion while receiving just $35 billion from the same funding package.
One hospital network cited by the lawmakers is Inova Health Systems, a Virginia hospital network that got roughly $186 million from the relief fund in 2020 and 2021 despite reporting $255 million in profits during that same period. Conversely, the rural New York hospital Arnot Ogden Medical Center received just around $18 million from the feds despite taking pandemic-related losses.
“We are concerned about HHS’s decisions to provide … funds to highly profitable hospitals in wealthy areas while rural hospitals risked going bankrupt as they tried to provide care to Americans in need,” Comer and Langworthy wrote. “It is crucial that we understand how the Department of Health and Human Services distributed these funds to hospitals that did not need it while hospitals in need received minimal benefit.”
The letter invites Becerra to turn over various administration information related to the federal hospital relief fund, including documents about how HHS decided which hospitals or health care providers received aid under the scheme. The letter also requests a full list of aid recipients and how much each awardee received.
Comer and Langworthy demand as well that Becerra turn up documents related to hospitals that laid off staff despite getting federal funding during the pandemic, as well as the number of medical debt claims such institutions made against patients during that time.
Becerra faces a deadline of April 25 to respond. HHS representatives did not answer for comment Tuesday.
Lawmakers initially approved $175 billion in hospital relief funding under the 2020 CARES Act, short for Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security. That figure increased to $178 billion through additional earmarks allocated in the 2020 Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act and the federal government’s 2021 omnibus spending plan.
Meanwhile, Congress is awaiting declassified documents from the intelligence community after President Biden last month signed a bipartisan directive aimed at gathering information on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The measure, sponsored by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, instructs the director of national intelligence to make public information related to potential links between the virus’s outbreak in China in late 2019 and coronavirus research conducted around the same time at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
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