These Philadelphia-area hospitals had the most Medicaid patients last year

Some Philadelphia-area hospitals fear significant financial losses from Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that targeted the low-income health insurance program for savings to pay for tax cuts championed by President Donald Trump.

More than 840,000 people in Southeastern Pennsylvania have health insurance through Medicaid, which is jointly funded by state and federal governments. Three-quarters of them are in Philadelphia and Delaware County.

The most notable changes to Medicaid rules, including new work requirements and limits on how states can raise extra money from the federal government to fund Medicaid, don’t take effect for years. That makes it hard to predict what will happen under the Republican-advanced legislation that Trump last month signed into law.

To paint a broad picture of local hospitals’ current Medicaid exposure, The Inquirer sliced Pennsylvania hospital data four ways: the percentage of revenue from Medicaid, the overall amount of Medicaid revenue, the percentage of patients with Medicaid, and the overall number of patients.

The results were strikingly different: Large hospitals with relatively small percentages of Medicaid sometimes land near the top of the list when the facilities are ranked by the total revenue at stake.

The most common way to look at how much Medicaid business a hospital has involves tallying its percentage of revenue from the program.

But that doesn’t fully capture the impact because Medicaid pays lower rates than private insurers. This effectively reduces the percentage figure, especially for hospitals with a large revenue base outside Medicaid.

» READ MORE: These Pennsylvania hospitals had the highest percentage of revenue from Medicaid last year

The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, for example, ranks 16th out of 29 hospitals in the region for its percentage of revenue from Medicaid. But the academic medical center had the second-highest amount of Medicaid revenue in the region, behind Temple University Hospital.

The number and percentage of patients with Medicaid admitted by a hospital provides additional insight on the significance of Medicaid to a hospital’s operations.

Jefferson Einstein Philadelphia has the highest percentage of Medicaid admissions by far.

But Einstein ranks third behind Temple and HUP based on the absolute number of admissions because it has a smaller base.