The provisions also call for the IRS to review the tax-exempt status of each hospital every three years. The U.S. Treasury and Department of Health and Human Services will be required to submit an annual report to Congress on charity, bad debt expenses and unreimbursed costs of government programs and to provide a report in five years on trends seen in these areas, according to the release.
“Tax-exempt hospitals don’t have many measures of accountability for their special status. The law hasn’t given them much direction, and so they’ve defined standards for themselves. Sometimes that’s resulted in providing very little charitable patient care or other community benefits, failing to publicize charitable care to patients, charging indigent, uninsured patients more than insured patients and using very aggressive collection practices,” Sen. Grassley said in the release.”The provisions take steps to differentiate tax-exempt hospitals from for-profit hospitals and provide further transparency about tax-exempt hospitals’ fulfilling their charitable mission. Congress, the IRS and the public will now have additional tools and information to ensure that charitable hospitals act charitably.”
Read the release about Sen. Grassley’s provisions for tax-exempt hospitals.
