If our side knew how to fight the information war more Americans would know that non-profit hospitals are making a killing — here is Richard Menger:
The tax incentives for non-profits are working out pretty well for non-profit hospitals. But is it working out for everyone else?
The annual cost of health care for the average American family hovers around $20,000. Premiums increase yearly, and this is a primary driver of why real wages for average Americans don’t seem to improve. Meanwhile, the CEO of non-profit Banner Health, based out of Arizona, raked in $21.6 million last year. Nearly half of the CEOs of America’s leading non-profit health systems made more than $2.5 million. Only eight of the 82 executives of non-profit companies earned less than $1 million.
These sorts of salaries amid the backdrop of struggling families would make even the most loyal believers in the free market pause—except this isn’t capitalism. This isn’t the market at work. It’s crony capitalism with the exploitation of market-related inefficiencies and rent-seeking behavior.
The problem is moral hazard in an administrative state.
Opening the Books
A recently published OpenTheBooks report shows just how the puppets are pulled by the strings of non-profit health systems. The report investigated the leading 82 non-profit hospitals in the United States. The hospitals investigated in the report had combined net assets of $203.1 billion. The average net asset growth over the last year was 23.6 percent. This was the average. Non-profit Ascension Health in St. Louis increased their net assets by 1,211 percent in one year.
As a point of reference, the most highly compensated executive in the for-profit corporations studied in the report was at $6.3 million (CEO of Tenet Healthcare Corporation). For-profit hospitals averaged only a 1.5 percent growth rate over the same time period. Additionally, roughly $2 billion flowed into non-profit health entities from federal agencies via grants. They also received charitable contributions of nearly $5.2 billion.
Read more: FEE.org
Image credit: www.fee.org.
