Opinion: HHS’s proposed rule pays lip service to addressing the climate crisis, the greatest threat to human health
In April, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the world’s most powerful health care agency — responsible for overseeing the largest industry in the world’s largest economy — offered a pretend proposal for regulating health care’s massive carbon footprint of 550 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO2e), or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. HHS is largely responsible for the health care industry’s carbon pollution because the federal government is the largest health care payer. What HHS proposed for addressing the climate crisis is a regulatory illusion intended to accomplish nothing.
Specifically, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is proposing in its 2025 inpatient hospital rule to “allow” a small number of hospitals that had been selected to participate in a five-year surgical procedures demonstration to “voluntarily” report the greenhouse gas emissions they directly emit as well as those from the power they purchase, beginning in 2026. Even assuming that all of these hospitals voluntarily report their greenhouse gas emissions, they constitute a trivial amount of one of the world’s largest sources of such emissions, making up nearly 9% of total annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and 4.5% of the total worldwide, along with an equal amount of toxic air pollutants. The social cost of health care’s entire carbon footprint is upwards of $3 trillion a year.
