AHA, Bernie Spar Over Nonprofit Community Benefits

The hospital lobby and the chairman of the HELP committee provide vastly different analyses on the extent of charity care and community benefits provided by nonprofits.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, and the American Hospital Association are at odds over the level of community benefits and charity care that nonprofit hospitals provide in exchange for their tax-exempt status.

Sanders, chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) released a report this week that claims that nonprofit hospitals aren't holding up their end of the bargain.

"Hospitals have gladly accepted the tax benefits that come with nonprofit status but have failed to provide the required community benefits," Sanders says in his report. "Non-profit hospitals spent only an estimated $16 billion on charity care in 2020, or about 57% of the value of their tax breaks in the same year. Those hospitals have made information about their charity care programs difficult to access, leaving many patients unaware that they may qualify for free ordiscounted care."

The AHA this week fired back with a report showing that nonprofit hospitals provided more than $129 billion in community benefits in 2020.

"Even in the face of a once-in-a-century pandemic, all hospitals, regardless of ownership type, continued to provide a comprehensive range of benefits, programs and essential services to their communities," AHA says. "The analysis calculates that tax-exempt hospitals' and health systems' total community benefits were 15.5% of their total expenses in 2020, based on data from the Internal Revenue."