Dr. Jeffery Parks is a board certified general surgeon working in Cleveland who writes regularly at Buckeye Surgeon.
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In the Cleveland Plain Dealer today is a front page report on the amount of charity care provided by the three main private (but non-profit) hospitals in the metro-Cleveland area. On average, the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, and Sisters of Charity spent just over 2% of their revenue on the provision of charity care in 2007.
Because of the work of Senator Charles Grassley, all non-profit hospitals will be required to disclose information on how much free care they provide, starting in 2009. These large institutions have come under fire recently because of the tax breaks they receive from being “non-profit” hospitals. Particularly in Cleveland, where the safety net hospital (MetroHealth) had to cut jobs and services just to break even, this sort of transparency will be crucial to ensure that such tax breaks are justified and that everyone is (in the words of President Obama) “doing their fair share”. It seems to me that 2% is a rather paltry number, especially given the other expensive projects that The Clinic seems to have the funds for, in Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi.
In this era of federal bailouts and car company executives being fired by our President, it doesn’t seem unreasonable anymore for a “non-profit” hospital to be required to allocate a little more than 2% of revenue toward charity care if they want to continue to be exempt from the prying fingers of the IRS….
