"It’s an open secret that not all spending hospitals can claim as community benefits are actually meaningful for community health," the nonprofit's president, Vikas Saini, and policy analyst, Judith Garber, wrote. "The broad definition of community benefit — one of many loopholes in the U.S. tax code — allows hospitals to include spending on items that don’t directly address community health needs. That’s why we focused on the spending that matters most for local communities, some of which are losing tens of millions of dollars in property tax revenue to support nonprofit hospitals."
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“In the last 30 years, there’s been a huge increase in the amount of administrators in hospitals and the money that’s flowing through the health care system,” said Dr. Vikas Saini, a physician and president of the Lown Institute, a health care think tank.
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"Hospitals that serve working people tend to have lower margins, lower profits, and less of a cushion in the event of a crisis," said Dr. Vikas Saini, a physician and the president of the Lown Institute, a health care think tank.
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According to a new report by the Lown Institute, close to 80% of more than 1,700 nonprofit hospitals studied “spent less on charity care and community investment than the estimated value of their tax breaks.” The report also found that this so-called “fair share” deficit, which was $14.2 billion in 2020, was “enough to erase the medical debts of 18 million Americans or rescue the finances of more than 600 rural hospitals at risk of closure.”
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Are New York hospitals spending enough on charity care and community investments to justify receiving tax exemptions? The answer is no, says nonpartisan health policy think tank Lown Institute, for a total of 26 hospitals spread across the state.
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How are hospital finances doing? The short answer is, it depends on the type of hospital...
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Every major hospital in central Ohio is expanding, as some are building bigger facilities and some are including more in-patient beds. That’s also true for the rest of the state and across the U.S. What’s driving this construction boom and who will fill all the beds and pick up the tab?
Guests:
- Tom Campanella, Health Care Executive-In-Residence at Baldwin Wallace University
- Jay Anderson, Chief Operating Officer for The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
- Dr. Vikas Saini, President of Lown Institute
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"We already knew UPMC was ripping us off, exploiting our hospital workers to the point of a staffing crisis that puts our loved ones’ lives at risk, and leaving our most marginalized communities behind without access to care," Lee, a Pittsburgh Democrat, said in a statement. "But the fact that we now know that UPMC is cheating our community out of $246 million on the backs of taxpayers is shameful beyond reprieve."
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“There needs to be a paradigm shift,” Saini said. “What we need from hospitals in the 21st century is different from how we used to do things. Our goal with this is to ask a series of questions, ask everybody … to examine the question: how we should be doing this? Because the way we’re doing it, is not really meeting the needs of communities.”
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“We’re starting to see policymakers and communities hold hospitals accountable for their social responsibility,” said Dr. Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, said during a webinar Tuesday about the report. “For example, state and local officials in Atlanta and the Georgia NAACP recently filed a federal complaint against Wellstar Health System for closing two hospitals known for serving the Black community while planning to open a new hospital in a whiter and wealthier area.”
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Nonprofit hospitals receive substantial tax breaks worth tens of billions each year. But how many hospitals actually give back to communities as much as they receive in tax benefits?
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A new report examining the finances of 1,763 nonprofit hospitals in the United States finds that more than three-quarters fall short on expected investments in their communities.
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Ten percent of Americans owe medical debt. According to a new report, much of that debt is owed to hospitals. What does this tell us about billing practices, financial assistance, and the balance between patients and profits in our current hospital systems?
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Tower Health’s trio of Chester County hospitals — Phoenixville, Brandywine, and Jennersville — lost their tax-exempt status due to the excessive salaries of the company’s executives, writes Judith Garber for the Lown Institute. The Pennsylvania appellate court recently denied property tax exemptions for these hospitals. Jennersville Hospital has already been sold to another system, while Brandywine Hospital closed in January 2022.
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