81–90 of 212 posts
They should be a well funded public service that don't make a profit in the first place.
Like universities?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are the current for-profit hospitals not the same in addition to being hilariously unaffordable?
Basically they have huge monopoly on the opposite side. So they go to niche (eg rich.)
Regular hospitals should be public.
They should be a well funded public service that don't make a profit in the first place.
Why? To give terrible service and managed by bureaucrats? Or being a leech of the state medical system?
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.
Or. It's more like this - $90k bill - you pay your annual $10k deductible - the remaining $80k is only covered 80% because emergency visits only have 80% co insurance - you now owe $16k, after you've already paid $10k out of pocket for the deductible This is a real thing that happened to me recently. Not to mention I pay $1500/month for a family of 4. Nothing, absolutely nothing about the U.S. healthcare pricing stru…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For-profit hospitals that actually turn profits do pay income taxes. The concern is with non-profit hospitals. They don't distribute profits to shareholders. But some do pay high salaries to employees or have large and growing endowment funds. The author is arguing that threatening to tax some of those funds would incentivize non-profit hospitals to lower prices and give out more charity care. This isn't necessarily…
It gets into more arcane policy than clear economic effects. Why are dividends taxed, but not investments in a shell company that collects dividends? Corporations aren't natural people (spare me the inane conflation of "legal person" with "natural person", everyone who doesn't understand why those two concepts have distinct legal names), so there is no inherent reason why there's any need to tax organizations instead…
Why should a parent corporation have to pay taxes twice just because of its corporate structure?
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.
The hike idea of a “nonprofit” is dumb and ripe with abuse. Nonprofits still have to pay payroll, the phone bill etc. Why have someone deciding that they don’t have to pay taxes? They can certainly just show a loss for year after year.
The idea is that we want more of what nonprofits do. No taxes is an incentive. A nonprofit that turns a profit is presumably putting it to work eventually, such as adding a new wing. It's not as if they can do stock buybacks because there isn't any. There are many ways this structure is abused but the idea isn't absurd.
I look at one of our local private universities: A non profit with a huge endowment. Their prices keep going up, and then discount enough to make sure the student's price is as heavy as they could possibly bear. They put that money into real estate investment, but they don't actually do anything with the land: It's just always worth more to them than it is to other parties, because they don't pay property taxes. So for them the cost of speculation is the lowest there is. Land speculation is far worse than redevelopment into useful things, but instead, we are rewarding it.
So I look at the actual outcomes of the non-profit status, and I don't see how in the world they are good for the area around the university: We are lowering our tax base for the privilege of letting them keep blight around them, which then in return lowers prices, letting them buy even more land at a discount. So I look at the incentive, and I see that it's doing far more damage than what it makes. So it doesn't matter that it sounds good on paper: We shouldn't argue with the reality that is in front of our eyes.
We should tax them regardless.
The hike idea of a “nonprofit” is dumb and ripe with abuse. Nonprofits still have to pay payroll, the phone bill etc. Why have someone deciding that they don’t have to pay taxes? They can certainly just show a loss for year after year.
How is that worse than a for-profit company? If your local healthcare systems are not expanding while the regional population is expanding, you’ll have less care available for all regional residents.
There are ways to abuse non-profit status, but operating a large hospital and clinic system isn’t one of them.