Chambersburg Hospital's surplus funds grow, as does the number ...

Chambersburg Hospital treated more people who couldn't pay last year, according to a recent study, and the hospital's profit margin was up again.

[Local]

Hospitals love to tell you how much charity work they do both for marketing purposes and to maintain their tax exempt status.

A case only becomes charity when they have exhausted all methods to collect the money. It should be noted that the truly poor are covered by Medicaid so the folks we are talking about are those who work but do not have insurance or adequate insurance. Once the hospital has put the patient through the collection wringer and failed to extract the money they will call it "charity." This enables them to be a tax-exempt or charitable business. The rest of the businesses in the world simply write this off as bad debt and in no way does it exempt them from paying taxes on their income.

Hospitals inflate the amount of money they tell you is charity. They put a number on the services they bill, but this is greater than they normally collect from insurance companies. So, they are stating amounts for the charity care that exceed by a fair amount the money they would have received had the patient had an insurance policy.

Please also note that while hospitals are charitable / tax-exempt businesses this does not prevent them from paying huge salaries to the top executives. The CEO of most of these hospitals makes considerably more, with a masters level education, than any physician. If you want to know where the excesses are in health care, look directly at the folks who run the hospitals. In addition to huge salaries, they have perks such as cars, country club memberships, etc. and have golden parachutes and wonderful retirement plans while nurses who work at the same hospitals and actually save lives instead of pushing papers have very meager (pathetic) retirement plans.

So, you now get the idea what "charity" really means in the hospital system.

Chambersburg

[Dave]

You should also remember that those paying cash, pay list price. Insurance companies get billed with discounts around 30-40%. But if you don't have insurance, you get screwed.

As for the previous comment, running a hospital is not easy. Any successful hospital absolutely requires a top notch administrratior & finance guy. It is a constant battle to stay ahead of the insurance companies, government regulations, and to deal with doctors who think they own the place.

I am surprised that he hospital is doing well despite the efforts of Summitt to take away some of the OR, imaging, & lab work to their own facility. This siphons away paying customers while leaving the slow pay & no pay customers to the hospital.

[Follow The Money]

Dave wrote:

You should also remember that those paying cash, pay list price. Insurance companies get billed with discounts around 30-40%. But if you don't have insurance, you get screwed.
As for the previous comment, running a hospital is not easy. Any successful hospital absolutely requires a top notch administrratior & finance guy. It is a constant battle to stay ahead of the insurance companies, government regulations, and to deal with doctors who think they own the place.
I am surprised that he hospital is doing well despite the efforts of Summitt to take away some of the OR, imaging, & lab work to their own facility. This siphons away paying customers while leaving the slow pay & no pay customers to the hospital.

Siphoning off services makes sense because the money stays in the Summitt health care system. The Summitt location, off campus, is user friendly for those people that have trouble getting around. The real problem to Summitt is that many doctors have set up their off site clinics and take the easy work to their facility leaving Summitt with the more costly services. At the same time Summitt has the the same equipment that the clinics have and it is under utilized. The local doctors have "cherry picked " what they want and have made tons of money doing it. I guess one question remains, why do we need universal health insurance, it looks like everyone in our area is getting treatment. Some pay, some don't.

[a patient of the hospital]

What gets me is i have insurance and what they don't pay i am expected to pay. when there are people that have no insurance or little and they are just wrote off. i don't pay and they send me to collections. I don't think it is fair i have insurance and they come after me and leave the others that go to the hospitl for a toothache. I never go unless i have to and pay dearly. It is unfair the poor always get off and the working person is expected to pay.

[Follow The Money]

a patient of the hospital wrote:

What gets me is i have insurance and what they don't pay i am expected to pay. when there are people that have no insurance or little and they are just wrote off. i don't pay and they send me to collections. I don't think it is fair i have insurance and they come after me and leave the others that go to the hospitl for a toothache. I never go unless i have to and pay dearly. It is unfair the poor always get off and the working person is expected to pay.

"You ain't seen nothin yet" just wait until Dave's guy Barack Obama gets elected. 1 line for paying/insurance patients, 1 line for "No Habla".

[Its about time]

a patient of the hospital wrote:

What gets me is i have insurance and what they don't pay i am expected to pay. when there are people that have no insurance or little and they are just wrote off. i don't pay and they send me to collections. I don't think it is fair i have insurance and they come after me and leave the others that go to the hospitl for a toothache. I never go unless i have to and pay dearly. It is unfair the poor always get off and the working person is expected to pay.

This isn't true because my boyfriend's job doesn't offer insurance and he has had surgery every 3 months in Baltimore for the past 2 years. He has paid so much money and they aren't trying to help him at all. They call him every month for a payment over the phone. If you are a day late they are on you.

[Hmmm]

The more that is done at the Summit outpatient facilities for paying patients and the more that is done at the hospital itself by the non-paying patients, the more it makes the hospital look like it is doing more charitable work than their entire system really is doing. What one needs is an entire Summit-wide accounting of "charitable care" vs. paid care and not limit the info to the hospital itself. They are playing a numbers game with the community. Surprise!

[Why Worry]

Follow the money
I'm pretty sure that with the exception of two local doctors, they all work for/ or their practices are directly connected and controled by Summit Health.

I do know when those two physicians want to admit a patient, they have to go through another doctor connected to the hospital, and pay a fee to the admitting doctor.

[FED]

The hospital industry's spin -- and Summit Health's spin -- on the issue of "uncompensated care" is insulting. They complain about the $678 million in "uncompensated care," but what they don't tell you is that 62% of that uncompensated care is NOT charity care; it is bad debt. The very report they reference says so, on p. 14 (p. 16 of the PDF) here:
http://www.phc4.org/reports/fin/07/docs/fin20...
Bad debt means that it was not charity care; it was a bill on which the hospital actually attempted to collect at some point. The community deserves a straight answer from Summit Health: how much of their "uncompensated care" consisted of bills that they actually partially collected on? Or bills where they took people to collection agencies and damaged their credit rating? Hospitals have been known to do this.
The whining about "uncompensated care" is just a way for the industry to detract from the fact that they had the highest statewide average profit margin last year of any year since the state started collecting this data (see p. 3 of the report or p. 5 of the PDF). It is true that people are hurting out there, but the hospital industry isn't -- or maybe some of the smaller community hospitals are hurting, but Summit Health isn't hurting at all. Chambersburg Hospital's profit rate is well above the already-high state average. And Waynesboro?! Of course all organizations need a surplus, including non-profit organizations. But there is no excuse for a non-profit hospital to have a double-digit profit margin in one year, let alone over a three-year average as Waynesboro does.
They cry crocodile tears and then gush about the hospitals' generosity -- usually about how much the hospital's employees, not the hospital itself, gave to the United Way!

[Tired]

I think it is time for the school district to challenge the taax exempt status of the local hospital. They keep making more and more money at the expense of the taxpayers.

[bigtown809]

Chambersburg is really growing its a big town our population is 52,000 living in Chambersburg and our valley is huge too Cumberland valley and Leigh Valley are the biggest valley in PA And Chambersburg has alot of new stores like on Norland ave. and its just like a big city with the crime we have alot of mexicans and black people living downtown and we have gansters we have 5 different school districts in Chambersburg CASD, Montisori,Shalom,CVCS,Chorpus Cristy and its about time their selling the farms and turning into part of the city C Burg is is in the middle its a small city but a big town.