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Big Hospitals Provide Skimpy Charity Care–Despite Billions in Tax Breaks
- malshe 4y agohttps://archive.ph/mCRie https://archive.ph/mCRie https://www.wsj.com/articles/nonprofit-hospitals-vs-for-profit-charity-care-spending-11657936777?st=6rfmyso1eyti5sh&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/articles/nonprofit-hospitals-vs-for-prof...
- malshe 4y agoFrom the article: Nonprofit hospitals get billions of dollars in tax breaks in exchange for providing support to their communities. A Wall Street Journal analysis shows they are often not particularly generous. These charitable organizations, which comprise the majority of hospitals in the U.S., wrote off in aggregate 2.3% of their patient revenue on financial aid for patients’ medical bills. Their for-profit competitors, a category including publicly traded giants such as HCA Healthcare Inc., wrote off 3.4%, the Journal found in an analysis of the most-recent annual reports hospitals file with the federal government. Among nonprofits with the smallest shares of patient revenue going toward charity care—well under 1%—were high-profile institutions including the biggest hospitals of California’s Stanford Medicine and Louisiana’s Ochsner Health systems. At Avera Health, a major hospital system in South Dakota, charity care was roughly half of 1% of patient revenue across all its 18 hospitals.