Sponsors (2)
The bill increases transparency about uncompensated care for non‑citizens to inform taxpayers and policymakers, but it may deter immigrants from seeking care, raise privacy and discrimination risks, impose reporting costs on hospitals, and produce potentially misleading fiscal estimates.
Hospitals will be required to produce annual counts and dollar estimates of uncompensated care provided to non‑citizens, increasing transparency about care costs for providers and the public.
Taxpayers and policymakers will gain data showing how uncompensated care to non‑citizens relates to federal Medicare and Medicaid outlays, helping inform budgeting and policy decisions.
Immigrants and other patients may be deterred from seeking care because intake forms will ask about citizenship status, which could worsen health outcomes and public health.
Hospitals and health systems will face new administrative burdens and annual reporting costs to collect citizenship data and calculate uncompensated care amounts.
Collecting and reporting patients' citizenship information raises privacy and discrimination risks if data are misused or disclosed, threatening patient trust and civil‑liberties protections.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Mandates citizenship questions at intake for Medicare‑participating hospitals and annual facility/HHS reports on counts and uncompensated care for noncitizen/non‑national patients, plus federal spending estimates.
Introduced December 17, 2025 by Nancy Mace · Last progress December 17, 2025
Requires hospitals that participate in Medicare (including critical access hospitals and rural emergency hospitals) to ask every patient on intake whether they are a U.S. citizen or national, beginning 180 days after enactment. Those hospitals must file annual reports to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) counting non‑U.S. citizen/national patients and reporting the dollar value of uncompensated care provided to them; HHS must publish an annual public report that aggregates those facility reports and estimates related Medicare and Medicaid federal spending that would not have occurred without that uncompensated care. The bill creates new, recurring data-collection and public-reporting requirements but does not appropriate funds or change benefit eligibility rules. It emphasizes tracking uncompensated care associated with noncitizens/non‑nationals and producing federal spending estimates based on those data.