US Warned of 2032 Hospital Crisis

U.S. hospitals are on track for a crisis come 2032 that may lead to hundreds of thousands of additional deaths each year. This is the warning of a study by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who found that hospitals are not only fuller now than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic—but are on track to exceed the critical threshold of 85 percent hospital occupancy within just seven years. "For general hospital beds that are not ICU-level, many consider a bed shortage to occur at an 85 percent national hospital occupancy, marked by unacceptably long waiting times in emergency departments, medication errors and other in-hospital adverse events," said paper author and UCLA professor of medicine Richard Leuchter in a statement. "If the U.S. were to sustain a national hospital occupancy of 85 percent or greater, it is likely that we would see tens to hundreds of thousands of excess American deaths each year."

In their study, Leuchter and his colleagues took advantage of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s COVID-19 data tracking dashboards to record occupancy data for nearly every U.S. hospital in the period from August 2, 2020 to April 27, 2024. Hospital occupancy is calculated by dividing the number of patients receiving care at a given time by the number of staffed hospital beds present in the institution. The team then combined this information with both data on national hospitalization rates and population projections from the U.S. Census Bureau to model future hospital occupancy scenarios through to the year 2035. The team found that the national hospital occupancy post-pandemic was 75 percent—11 percent higher than estimated figure for the decade leading up to the outbreak. According to the CDC, whenever the national ICU occupancy hits 75 percent, for example, it leads to some 12,000 excess deaths two weeks later. And the problem with sustained high levels of hospital occupancy, the researchers explain, is that it does not provide a sufficient buffer against unexpected surges, seasonal fluctuations and factors like daily bed turnover.

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"We've all heard about increased hospital occupancy during the height of COVID-19 pandemic," said Leuchter. "But these findings show that hospitals are as full, if not more so, than they were during the pandemic—even well into 2024 during what would be considered a post-pandemic steady state." Breaking down the numbers, the team determined that the increase in hospital occupancy is not being driven by an increase in hospitalizations—with admissions staying relatively unchanged from the pre- to post-pandemic years—but by a 16 percent decrease in the number of staffed hospital beds available for patients. Previous studies have suggested that a national hospital occupancy of 85 percent constitutes a hospital bed shortage. Projecting forward—and accounting for an increase in hospitalizations as the result of an aging U.S. population ages—the team predicted that we could cross this threshold by 2032 for adult hospital beds if neither the hospital admission rate nor the availability of staffed beds changes.

As for the cause of the decline of staffed hospital beds in the U.S., such remains unclear. "Our study was not designed to investigate the cause," Leuchter said, adding: "But other literature suggests it may be due to healthcare staffing shortages, primarily among registered nurses, as well as hospital closures." The latter, he said, has been partially driven by "private equity firms purchasing hospitals and effectively selling them for parts." The researchers do have recommendations to help avert the looming hospital bed crisis—for one, they said, hospital bankruptcies and closures need to be prevented by revamping hospital reimbursement schemes and the introduction of new regulations on private equity involvement in healthcare. At the same time, they said, staffing shortages need to be addressed by tackling such issues as burnout and obstacles to recruitment—such as, Leuchter said, the U.S. State Department's decision last June to temporarily freeze the issuing of new visas for international nurses. Leuchter added: "In the slightly longer term, we need more innovative care delivery models that can reduce hospitalizations by diverting would-be admissions to specially-designed acute care clinics." Newsweek has reached out to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for comment on the study's findings. Do you have a tip on a health story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about hospital administration? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.

Reference

Leuchter, R. K., Delarmente, B. A., Vangala, S., Tsugawa, Y., & Sarkisian, C. A. (2025). Health Care Staffing Shortages and Potential National Hospital Bed Shortage. JAMA Network Open, 8(2). http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.60645