By Charlene MacDonald, Executive Vice President of Public Affairs, Federation of American Hospitals

Before, during, and after Hurricanes Helene and Milton, hospitals across the Southeast went above and beyond to protect their patients, employees, and communities while ensuring 24/7 quality care.

• To ensure patient safety, hospitals directly in the storms’ paths transferred patients to sister facilities out of harm’s way, with HCA alone evacuating over 400 patients to safety.
• Hospitals in areas that experienced catastrophic flooding – including HCA’s Doctors Hospital of Augusta in Georgia, CHS’s Tennova Newport Medical Center in Tennessee, CHS’s ShorePoint Punta Gorda Hospital, and HCA’s Florida Largo Hospital – moved patients and equipment to higher ground and brought in additional doctors and nurses to provide care for all those in need.
• Hospitals in regions where roads were washed out or impassable became shelters for their employees, ensuring nurses and doctors could continue providing 24/7 patient care by offering safe places to sleep, shower, do laundry, and receive warm meals.

Hospitals invested hundreds of millions of dollars to protect their patients and employees, and their response was nothing short of heroic. Hospitals transferred patients to other facilities, secured generators for power, provided potable water, flew in additional health care workers to relieve their employees, set up shelters, and now are working quickly to repair damaged equipment and facilities. Helping hospitals quickly repair and recover will be critical to ensuring they are ready to provide uninterrupted patient care when the next disaster strikes.

That’s where Congress can help. While many hospitals aren’t eligible for FEMA relief, there are commonsense, bipartisan ways Congress can leverage tax policy to help ensure hospitals and health care workers can continue to serve impacted communities. Assistance is needed to help employers in the area rebuild and provide incentives to keep or bring back employees to live and work in the impacted areas – – this assistance would include:

• Workforce Retention: Reinstate Disaster Zone Employee Retention Credits, originally passed following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and extend and expand Work Opportunity Tax Credits to help ensure hospitals can retain their workforce as they reopen, rebuild, and restart normal operations.
• Facility Repairs: Target bonus depreciation to federally declared disaster zones to enable hospitals to repair and rebuild damaged facilities and equipment.
• Temporary Employer Support: Provide tax credits for hospitals that offered housing for employees and allow certain hospitals to defer some employment taxes to ensure hospitals have the resources necessary sustain operations in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.

Before the 118th Congress comes to a close, we have an opportunity to support health care providers who risked their lives to help keep their community safe in a time of crisis. As Congress considers disaster relief, they need to include these policies – all of which have been previously supported by both parties to help businesses rebuild and recover after disasters – to help hospitals, their employees, and the communities they serve, and ensure uninterrupted patient care 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.