I don’t really have any study off the top of my head, most of my information is coming from departmental meetings we had during the COVID shut down. Though I’m sure it’s not too hard to find, it’s a well known problem, to the point where most states have legislation limiting the construction of new hospitals.
I work in orthopedics and rehabilitation in my state’s only trauma 1 ward, and during COVID our department was shut down for a couple weeks, as a lot of my clinics treatment is elective based.
Because elective services tend to be the profitable aspect of healthcare, we ended up in a situation of diminishing resources and an increase in demand for emergent care for COVID treatment.
Emergent care is basically any condition we can’t legally/ethically turn away from the emergency room, no matter if the patient has insurance or not. During COVID lots of people without insurance spent a lot of time in emergency services, and because our profitable clinics were prevented from operating, our hospital went into a lot of debt.