U.S. nonprofit hospitals often get tax breaks worth far more than they spend on charity care and community investment, according to a new report from the Lown Institute, Healthcare Dive reports. Prominent systems such as Providence, Trinity Health, Mass General Brigham and the Cleveland Clinic had some of the largest of these “fair share deficits,” the healthcare think tank said.
The Lown Institute found 227 of the 275 hospital systems it studied spent less on charity care and community investment than the value of their tax exemptions. The fair share deficits of all hospital systems studied totaled $18.4 billion, which the institute argues could have been used to address health equity, housing, food insecurity and other local needs.
Many of the hospital systems also received hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act in 2020. The 275 systems examined operate more than 1,800 hospitals nationwide. Read more.
