Missouri Hospitals Release Data on Cost of Providing Community Benefit Services
The Missouri Hospital Association on Thursday released a report detailing the amounts individual Missouri hospitals spend on providing care to patients without health insurance, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. The report also lists eight categories of "community benefit," a term for hospital services that are provided free of charge. The report "comes after years of politicians and community groups pressuring not-for-profit hospitals to show why they deserve tax-exempt status," the Post-Dispatch reports. The report used as its base the cost of services instead of hospital charges because "[c]harges are so grossly variable from hospital to hospital," Crystal Haynes, CEO of St. Louis University Hospital and a member of the committee that helped create the report, said. John Colombo, a law professor who specializes in tax-exempt organizations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said it was interesting to compare the amount of community benefit provided by for-profit hospitals compared with not-for-profit hospitals. "That tells you something when you have a for-profit hospital giving away the same level of free care as nonprofit hospitals," he said (Feldstein, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 5/19).
The report is available online.
