Tag Archives: charity care

Pittsburgh reporter uncovers how for-profit hospitals differ from nonprofits in how they provide charity care

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When reviewing just about any hospital bill today, it’s difficult to imagine that hospitals were founded to provide care for the poor. “Hospitals in the United States emerged from institutions, notably almshouses, that provided care and custody for the ailing poor,” says America’s Essential Hospitals, an association of hospitals and health systems dedicated to providing high-quality care for all, including the vulnerable. “Rooted in this tradition of charity, the public hospital traces its ancestry to the development of cities and community efforts to shelter and care for the chronically ill, deprived, and disabled.” Continue reading →

Joseph Burns (@jburns18), an independent journalist who resides in Brewster, Massachusetts, is AHCJ’s topic leader on health reform. He welcomes questions and suggestions and tip sheets at joseph@healthjournalism.org.

Hospitals use algorithms to transform bad debt into charity care

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Photo: Andrew Magill via Flickr

Photo: Andrew Magill via Flickr

Bad debt? Or charity care? Sean Hamill of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently wrote an interesting story about how hospitals increasingly are re-categorizing the health care bills of low-income patients in a fashion that may be helping the hospital more than the patient.

Some angles in this story are especially timely as the 2017 Affordable Care Act enrollment season is about to begin. Continue reading →

Contributing editor to Politico Magazine and former health care editor-at-large, Politico, Commonwealth Fund journalist in residence and assistant lecturer at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

AHCJ fellow tells how she examined hospital community benefit, post-ACA

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Reform_Kutscher-StFrancisMemorialHospital

Photo: HaeB via Wikimedia CommonsSaint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco

Beth Kutscher, a Modern Healthcare reporter who recently become the publication’s California bureau chief, has covered health care finance for several years, with a particular focus on for-profit health care.

During her 2015 AHCJ Reporting Fellowship on Health Care Performance, she looked at the impact Medicaid expansion had on hospital finances. And she spent some time reporting on how not-for-profit hospitals have to give back to their communities to justify their tax exempt status.

That’s often through providing charity care or training physicians – but some hospitals are addressing different community needs. One San Francisco hospital, for instance, supports a program that escorts kids after school through a gang-ridden neighborhood, enhancing both their physical safety and their stress levels.

Find out more about how Kutscher explored this topic, and what she learned from it, in her How I Did It essay.

Contributing editor to Politico Magazine and former health care editor-at-large, Politico, Commonwealth Fund journalist in residence and assistant lecturer at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Cost reports show financial health of hospitals, amount of charity care they provide

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Clifton Adcock

Clifton Adcock

Oklahoma Watch, a nonprofit investigative journalism team, recently published a two-part series on hospitals based on financial data obtained for every hospital in the state. As reporter Clifton Adcock writes in an article for AHCJ, the series revealed that between half and three-fourths of small general hospitals in Oklahoma were losing money, and that hospitals had spent only small fractions of their net patient revenues on charity care.

Hospitals get “disproportionate-share” (DSH) payments from the federal government to help cover costs for treating the indigent. Because Oklahoma was not expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, hospital groups said they expected to take a big financial hit from the law’s cuts to DSH payments. Oklahoma Watch wanted to see how much they relied on such payments. Continue reading →

Pia Christensen (@AHCJ_Pia) is the managing editor/online services for AHCJ. She manages the content and development of healthjournalism.org, coordinates AHCJ's social media efforts and edits and manages production of association guides, programs and newsletters.

Public hospitals, not nonprofits, shoulder burden of charity care

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Writing in the Contra Costa Times, Sandy Kleffman reports that while nonprofit hospitals in the East Bay are given millions in tax breaks, “The responsibility of caring for the indigent falls largely on the region’s public hospitals.”

Kleffman’s findings are based on her analysis of publicly available California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development reports, documents which she learned to access and process at a September webinar led by AHCJ board president and ProPublica senior reporter Charles Ornstein.

Her analysis revealed a substantial imbalance in the numbers, especially between public hospitals and nonprofits. For example, Contra Costa’s county hospital provided more than three quarters of the total amount of charity care given in the country in 2010, while the six nonprofits together accounted for just under 23 percent.

For their part, representatives of nonprofit hospitals protested that the numbers do not take into account the other community benefits they provide, nor are they adjusted to compensate for the differences in demographics across each institution’s patient pool.

For more on what went into Kleffman’s report, see her sidebar on “How we made comparisons.”

Andrew Van Dam of The Wall Street Journal previously worked at the AHCJ offices while earning his master’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism.