Top U.S. “Non-Profit” Hospitals & CEOs Racked Up Huge Pandemic Profits

May 18, 2023

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/top-us-non-profit-hospitals-and-ceos

Top U.S. “Non-Profit” Hospitals & CEOs Racked Up Huge Pandemic Profits

The top 20 hospitals pocketed $23 billion in Covid-aid from taxpayers. They profited from the pandemic while ignoring price transparency rules. Patient costs soared while life expectancy plummeted.

ADAM ANDRZEJEWSKI

MAY 10, 2023

OpenTheBooks.com auditors investigated America’s healthcare system and found so-called “non-profit” hospitals and their CEOs are getting richer while the American people are getting sicker and poorer.

Topline

The 20 largest non-profit hospitals in the country continued making massive profits while their cumulative net assets soared to $324.3 billion in 2021 from $200.6 billion in 2018. The year 2021 is the latest year available for cross-comparison purposes.

Those hospital systems received congressional Covid bailouts of $23 billion and only two providers partially paid their Covid bailout back.

Meanwhile, hospital executives racked up Wall Street-sized compensation packages which frequently exceeded $10 million per year. For example, the CEO at Ascension Healthcare based in St. Louis, Missouri made $13 million in 2021 – with three-year pay exceeding $22 million.

Furthermore, American life expectancy during this period sharply declined by a staggering 2.5 years from 2019 through 2022. While “comparable country averages” rebounded from a Covid-related drop in 2021, the U.S. continued declining in life expectancy.

Yet, the cost of health care is still astronomically high, as the average family paid $22,463 in health insurance premiums in 2022. That does not include out-of-pocket costs like co-pays and deductibles, which can be thousands more.

This has led to medical debt for about 100 million Americans.

In 2020, the Trump administration issued, and the Biden administration finalized (January 2021) a healthcare transparency rule – to spur market competition and inform patients.

Yet, two years after the rule took effect, an independent audit found that nearly three-quarters of hospitals in the country were not complying— flouting the mandate that prices be posted clearly and comprehensively. (See link for article)

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SUMMARY:
  • Why has life expectancy dropped if we are spending more, and increasing hospital assets?
  • Are “non-profit” hospitals truly operating in the public interest or are they gaming the system as public healthcare charities under IRS section 501(c)3 of the tax code?
  • Why aren’t hospitals paying back the COVID aid?
  • Why are hospitals that score less than 100% on price transparency allowed to keep taxpayer-funded bailout dollars?
  • Only one of every four hospitals follow the federal price transparency rules.  CMS needs to enforce the rules on the three-quarters of hospitals that are not compliant.
America’s non-profit hospitals must justify their pandemic profiteering. In the top 20 largest non-profits, for every $1 in Covid bailout from the U.S. taxpayer, their net assets jumped — on average — $5.

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Category:

Activism, Viruses

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