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Hospitals that make profits should pay taxes

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Re: Hospitals that make profits should pay taxes

#61

Post by simonbarker87 »

echelon wrote: post #44
jraph wrote: post #19

They should be a well funded public service that don't make a profit in the first place.

Random things like cancer and genetic diseases happen, but an awful lot of disease is caused by personal choice. Drinking, smoking, unhealthy lifestyle, etc. Personal behaviors are the cause of a huge portion of our healthcare costs. I feel the same way about the recent auto insurance increases being caused by the shopping behaviors of others. Expensive EVs get completely totaled in accidents, and now everyone has to…

But you’re already paying for other people’s illnesses through insurance with the downside of layers of middlemen taking a profit. At least here in the UK an emergency or cancer won’t bankrupt me, for the rest of it I can choose to get private health insurance if I like or wait for the NHS to work through the queue (which is sadly becoming increasingly common as our government is obsessed with copying what America does).

Re: Hospitals that make profits should pay taxes

#63

Post by Aurornis »

A lot of knee-jerk comments from people who didn’t read the article are missing the point it’s making and misunderstand the situation: Hospitals can be for-profit or non-profit organizations, and either role requires them to follow the law about what they must do with their profits and taxes.

The piece argues that hospitals should not be allowed to take nonprofit status. The article isn’t saying that hospitals are unique tax-free businesses (as many of the comments are suggesting at the time of writing this comment).

A more accurate title would be “Hospitals should not be allowed to operate as non-profits” but that wouldn’t incite the same reactions or generate as many clicks, of course.

Re: Hospitals that make profits should pay taxes

#64

Post by willcipriano »

jraph wrote: post #19

They should be a well funded public service that don't make a profit in the first place.

> well funded public service

There is. The US spends more per capita on socialized medicine than any of the countries that actually have socialized medicine.[0]

[0]https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

A P.S. for the "but the wait times!" crowd, look at the first chart then check out hospital beds, again per capita[1]

[1]https://data.oecd.org/healtheqt/hospital-beds.htm

Re: Hospitals that make profits should pay taxes

#66

Post by lupire »

missedthecue wrote: post #24
throwaway918274 wrote: post #12

1. I go into hospital and come out with 90k bill - I have insurance and I pay my copay of $130. 2. Insurance says "nah, we'll give you 18k" 3. Hospital goes "ok". 4. Hospital writes off as a 72k loss, which essentialy is a "tax deduction". This is good for me, but such a perverse incentive for the hospital.

99% sure that's now how accounting works. A loss is when expenses are more than revenue, not when you earn less than you wanted to. Roofing and construction contractors would be all over this if they could avoid taxes simply by negotiating down an invoice.

What happens when Microsoft "donates" $1B "worth" of its $0 cost copies of software to a school?

Re: Hospitals that make profits should pay taxes

#67

Post by dumbo-octopus »

rjzzleep wrote: post #15
nullindividual wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's worse is they enforce their religious worldview at these hospitals, denying legal medical treatments based off of the largest human hoax and political control mechanism ever invented by man.

In Germany some of the best hospitals are Christian (catholic I believe, but may be wrong). The US is a really weird place.

Plenty of good Christian hospitals here too. I suspect the parent is referring specifically to abortions, there are other procedures that a Christian would be potentially unwilling to perform (sex change operations, for instance), but they tend to require an experienced surgeon specifically trained in that operation, which wouldn't be hired by the hospital due to not aligning with their mission (would you want the government to force you to hire a .NET developer when you're purely an embedded systems shop?).

As for abortions in particular, if you are of the opinion that procedure would be murder, it would certainly be out of place for the government to force you to do it. How many folks who promote the government forcing doctors to do what they consider to be killing children would be okay with the government forcing them to kill another human in their day job?

Re: Hospitals that make profits should pay taxes

#68

Post by lupire »

INTPenis wrote: post #49
ec109685 wrote: post #42

Isn’t the distinction that non-profit hospitals have to plow surplus’s revenue back into the hospital versus distributing profit to investors / owners? If so, the tax exempt status seems aligned with how for profit businesses are taxed?

They can just create their own medical equipment supplier and funnel money that way. Bottom line is that when you let privat businesses decide they will always choose profit over people.

Where is the funnel? The for profit supplier pays taxes, and the expenses are deductible.

Re: Hospitals that make profits should pay taxes

#70

Post by jdsully »

colinmorelli wrote: post #57
throwaway918274 wrote: post #12

1. I go into hospital and come out with 90k bill - I have insurance and I pay my copay of $130. 2. Insurance says "nah, we'll give you 18k" 3. Hospital goes "ok". 4. Hospital writes off as a 72k loss, which essentialy is a "tax deduction". This is good for me, but such a perverse incentive for the hospital.

This is not really what happens. Hospitals and payers negotiate rates and contract at that rate before the service is provided. Assuming the service is not denied by the payer, the hospital knows that they'll only be reimbursed 18k from your insurance company (or at least has the data to know in advance, putting aside whether any one person could tell you what it will be). The 90k only served as a starting point for…

> usually obscenely high due to other regulatory and contractual reasons related to the negotiation process

Lets be real its due to greed nothing else.

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