IL hospital must prove community benefit, or else

Community hospitals make a ton of money from both insurance companies (which traditionally reimburse them at higher rates) and also from federal grants for taking care of indigent patients. The IRS needs to do an in-depth analysis to see what the hospitals mean by “free care” when they say they give out "millions in free care" It may be the $80 inflated price for Aspirin or $ 200 for bandages or IV fluids or $50/hour for a RN who is bean-counting instead of doing nursing. The economic consequences of lack of propriety in billing and ethical conduct trickles down to every aspect of healthcare. For example: the hospital pays unholy amounts for nurses to do clerical work (instead of working with sick patients), huge amounts to healthcare consultants who promise to get better reimbursements for hospitals, soft-money to doctors who refer patients, layers of redundant bureaucracy and protocols aimed at showing higher RVUs, all this to show they are being compliant with "federally-mandated goals". These are tax-deductible “cost of doing business”. Much of this is public funds either directly collected from patients or indirectly through insurance companies and Medicare. This leads to inflated costs across the healthcare sector. This is why you can’t have a CABG for $6000 in the US but can get a bargain pricing in India or Bangkok or United Kingdom. If you analyze healthcare costs, the direct payment to physicians is a miniscule ( less than 10%) of the healthcare expenditure in this country. The rest is wasted due to poor policing of the Big-pharma and the very powerful hospital and medical insurance lobby. Michael Moore was not very much off the mark in his movie Sicko!