Viewpoint: Taxing hospitals not the way to fix healthcare

A recent Politico article detailed how, under the ACA, some of the nation's top nonprofit hospitals saw revenues soar while cutting down on the charitable spending that is supposed to be their hallmark, but an op-ed in Bloomberg claimed the article's findings are not as controversial as one might think.

Megan McArdle, a columnist for Bloomberg, believes that higher utilization rates were the intended effect of the ACA's expanded insurance coverage, and that greater provider profits are an inevitable consequence of that increased utilization.

With greater coverage and fewer uninsured people for whom to provide charity care, Ms. McArdle doesn't view the Politico article's findings as breaking news, but instead as the logical result of the ACA, jarring as it may to be to see that organizations earning billions of dollars are not paying taxes.

"When the dust clears, and we can see who's holding the windfall, it's tempting to say 'That’s not what I wanted!' and frantically start trying to redistribute the windfall to some more deserving party by piling even more regulations atop the ones we already enacted," Ms. McArdle writes. "But such instincts should be kept under strict control, because they lead to the piecemeal meddling that got us into this mess in the first place."

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