> Contrary to your comment, yes, they generally are;
No, they're not.
> they're just using Hollywood accounting and referring to their profits as "excess earnings".
No, they aren't. Excess earnings are the correct technical term. Non-profit status, even in theory, has nothing to do with whether you earn more in revenue than you expend in costs, it has to do with whether there are stockholders or others who have a claim on accumulated returns.
More specifically, charitable nonprofits (which non-profit hospitals are) have a wide variety of additional requirements and restrictions (both in general, and specific additional requirements for hospitals, including several added by the ACA.)
> read that one, it's a good breakdown of the accounting that hospitals use to maintain their nonprofit status while behaving in every other way like any other for-profit business.
No, it's just a bunch of dishonest, or perhaps merely clueless, mischaracterizing; the most obvious example being considering money expended in providing Medicaid services but not covered by Medicaid reimbursement as money the hospital “paid to itself” rather than an external benefit. This isn't money the hospital paid to itself, it's money the hospital paid out to provide services under a public program providing healthcare to the medically indigent but which was not reimbursed by that public program (in general, Medicaid is a money-losing program for providers, as—while there are some exceptions—reimbursement is generally at the lowest of three things: a state set rate, the actual cost of providong the service, or the provider's usual and customary charge for the same or substantially similar service. This is at best break even, but over all, across all providers, it's always going to be, in practice, below actual cost.