00:00A period of financial recovery for U.S. hospitals is coming to an end as health care systems brace for
00:04the full force of federal policy changes.
00:07Bloomberg's Nick Carello joins us now with more.
00:09So Nick, Fitch warning that this sector is at or near a transition point.
00:14Is this all because of the One Big Beautiful bill?
00:17That's a really big driver.
00:18So Fitch flagged this as kind of their dominant concern facing the industry.
00:22The One Big Beautiful bill had a lot of changes for kind of the outlook to hospitals, mainly being how
00:29it's going to, you know, estimates are saying it's going to roll back the number of people on insurance plans
00:34by, you know, millions of people potentially.
00:37And that really could hit the bottom line of hospitals because uninsured people could still come in.
00:42They're forced to deliver care and it makes it much harder for them to get revenue for those procedures.
00:48Right. And at the same time, you've got demographics playing a role as well.
00:52So the gap between the better rated and lower rated hospitals will widen.
00:58Exactly. I mean, I think this was a more interesting piece to me.
01:00There's been a lot of coverage of the Medicaid cuts, but this is kind of a more slow moving macro
01:05pressure on the hospitals is that, you know, we're seeing tens, you know, over 10,000 baby boomers turn 65
01:12each day in the coming years.
01:14And that's simultaneously going to be taking a lot of skilled workers out of the health care workforce, potentially driving
01:19up labor costs.
01:20But also older people generally need more expensive care, more acute care.
01:25And so as an older population is going to hospitals in the U.S., that's just kind of a double
01:30-edged sword that they're going to have to deal with.
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