Make Non-Profit Hospitals Provide Charity Care

I am your constituent and I want you to know that religious hospitals, Catholic ones in particular, are skating by with tax exemptions from the federal and state governments and doing harm in the community. The harm comes from not helping women who need abortions or contraception. Forcing women who want tubal ligation after a c-section to risk a second operation elsewhere instead of performing it during the c-section. Additionally, on they make 4.3% of revenue from tax exemption while providing charity care of about 2.3%. To make matters worse, the Catholic Health Associations, a lobbying arm for Catolic Hospitals, helped write Schedule H if IRS form 990 for tax exempt organizations to detail community benefit. They are allowed to count as a benefit the difference between Medicaid reimbursement and “list price” for services, which can be inflated so the benefit looks enormous, but no expense was actually made. Look, there are a lot of things to fix here, but one of them is the IRS code that has no minimum community benefit. Washington State has implemented a law that forces hospitals to offer real assistance to anyone whose income is below a certain threshold. How about starting with that in federal law.