The Hospital Survey and Construction Act (), commonly known as the Hill–Burton Act, is a U.S. federal law passed in 1946, during the 79th United States Congress. It was sponsored by Senator Harold Burton of Ohio and Senator Lister Hill of Alabama. “Relatively little hospital construction took place during the Great Depression and World War II, so, by the end of the war, there was a severe shortage of hospital beds in the United States. The Hospital Survey and Construction Act of 1946, commonly referred to as the Hill-Burton Act, provided federal grants to states for the construction of new community hospitals (nonfederal, short-stay hospitals) that would be operated on a nonprofit basis. This legislation required that each state develop and upgrade, annually, a plan for health facility construction based on bed-to-population ratios, which became the basis for the allocation of federal construction grants to the states.” In 1946, after World War II ended, 3.2 community hospital beds were available per 1,000 civilian population in the United States. The objective of the Hill-Burton Act was to reach 4.5 beds per 1,000 population (Teisberg et al., 1991). The Hill-Burton program assisted in the construction of nearly 40% of the beds in the nation’s short-stay general hospitals and was the single greatest factor that increased the U.S. bed supply during the 1950s and 1960s (Haglund and Dowling, 1993). Indeed, the Hill-Burton Act made it possible for even small, remote communities to have their own hospitals (Wolfson and Hopes, 1994). By 1980, the United States had reached its goal of 4.5 community hospital beds per 1,000 civilian population (National Center for Health Statistics [NCHS], 2002) even though the Hill-Burton program ended in 1974. In November 1945, President Harry S. Truman delivered a special message to Congress in which he outlined a five-part program for improving the health and health care of Americans. The Hospital Survey and Construction Act responded to the first of President Truman's proposals, which called for the construction of hospitals and related health care facilities, and was designed to provide federal grants and guaranteed loans to improve the physical plant of the nation's hospital system. Money was designated to the states to achieve 4.5 beds per 1,000 people. The states allocated the available money to their various municipalities, but the law provided for a rotation mechanism, so that an area that received funding moved to the bottom of the list