Category: Massachusetts

…The federal financial assistance policy requires all tax-exempt hospitals to establish a written policy offering free or discounted care to qualifying patients. This policy exists because nonprofit hospitals receive billions in tax breaks each year. In 2021 alone, U.S. nonprofit hospitals benefited from $37.4 billion in tax exemptions. In return, they are required to provide community benefits, including financial assistance. 

Yet, every year, low-income patients like my father receive medical bills they should never have gotten — bills that, in some cases, push families into bankruptcy.  

The hospital gave my health insurance company a big discount. But they weren’t going to negotiate with me. 

January 29, 2025 

…The hospital I visited agreed to accept just over $2,500 from my insurance company — on an initial bill of $4,500 — but, to my surprise, it wanted another $701 from me. This size of charge isn’t unusual: The national average out-of-pocket cost that insured patients paid for an ER visit was $646, according to a 2022 report from Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker. 

…A Kaiser Health News analysis in 2019 found 45 percent of nonprofit hospitals were routinely sending bills to people who actually qualified for the hospitals’ own free or discounted care programs. 

There are 55 nonprofit hospitals in Massachusetts. Those hospitals receive tax benefits totaling more than $1.9 billion a year. In exchange for the tax breaks, the hospitals are required to provide financial assistance to patients who need it and give free care to the poor. But, some patients said they are in debt because they didn’t get the help they were entitled to…  

UMass Memorial Health Care is responsible to tell patients about the availability of financial assistance because it is a nonprofit, and gets nearly $152 million in tax exemptions per year, according to the Loan Institute.