Financial distress
Hospital closures, bankruptcies, and debt cycles — the balance-sheet signals that precede a facility going dark.
- Hospitals running out of cash: the days-cash signal, and why most of it is a reporting artifact
Federal HCRIS cost reports let us compute days cash on hand for 5,459 hospitals, but facility-level figures are distorted by system-level cash pooling — so the raw '2,800 hospitals under 30 days' headline is mostly noise. The defensible signal is narrower: 690 hospitals that report thin cash and also run an operating loss.
2026-06-04 · 14 min - Provider exclusions aren't rising — but they cluster around distressed operators
New additions to the OIG exclusion list are flat to declining — down 2.4% year-over-year through April 2026, and down 18.7% across full-year 2024 to 2025. The count is not the story. What concentrates is the composition: new exclusions cluster in facilities already showing the balance-sheet markers of financial distress.
2026-05-05 · 7 min