AHA: Article ‘fails to provide cohesive view’ of hospitals’ community benefits

A Dec. 1 article in Modern Healthcare “fails to provide a cohesive view of the many community benefits provided by tax-exempt hospitals and health systems,” AHA President and CEO Rick Pollack says in a letter to the editor. He notes, “No one should expect that the benefits hospitals provide will be the same for every community. The genius of community benefit is that it allows, even encourages, hospitals to provide benefits tailored to their community. The one size fits all approach suggested by some would be a disservice to the public. In 2015, hospitals and health systems reported total community benefits of 13.3 percent of their total hospital expenses. In addition, an Ernst and Young report from last fall showed that tax-exempt hospitals’ and health systems’ community benefit activities outweigh the value of their federal tax exemption by a factor of 11 to one. No other segment of the health care field produces this level of value for the public benefit it receives.”