Hospitals say free care has high cost

What do you mean free care has high cost? Not to the people who elect not to purchase it out of the guise that they "can't afford it"!

I'm sick of people crying "greed", "empathy", and "health care is a right". The hospitals, corporations, and wealthy (aka - people who have insurance) aren't greedy. Telling people to give more so you have more is not "empathy" or "contributing more to society", rather its forced theft in the form of taxation and redistribution of wealth. Health care is not a right, in the United States people are not denied care as it is - just look at how many illegal's get taken care of in the hospital without money or insurance.

No one wants people uninsured, but to tell me you're going to tax my health benefits or increase my taxes because someone else won't buy insurance since they'd rather have other luxuries instead (nicer car, own a home instead of rent, or a number of other things) is complete and utter b.s.

I hope this government run insurance scheme mirroring Canada and the UK is shot down. After all, the model for the legislation by congress (Massachusetts model) is already a complete and utter failure...we need oversight and certain regulations put in place, not a revamp of the system which leaders from other countries come to use because their own social health care systems in the guise of "universal care" completely suck.

Mr. John Stone pretty well sums up what the problem with the health care industry is. He sees his business growing. We already know from the seven million cancer survivors on welfare that if a patient becomes a liability to business, that patient gets dumped on the gov. Hence, the desperate need for health care reform.

Maybe soon we can get medicine back to being a service people desperately need, which will make it affordable again, rather than a product to be sold at any price.

If the hospitals are really hurting financially, why are they all expanding? Riverside, OSU, and Children's always have construction projects going on.

Why so much construction wrote:

If the hospitals are really hurting financially, why are they all expanding? Riverside, OSU, and Children's always have construction projects going on.

I work for Children's Hospital. I have not heard of anyone being laid off due to the recession. In fact, while the financials may be sound - it goes without saying that our intake is lower and lower due to the decreases in reimbursements from the government.

Also, expansion is due to future budgets and funds that are put aside for that reason - not to mention the local, state, and federal grants that are provided to help with the expansion (buildings, renovations) because it always returns back in the form of taxes.

recently hospitals have changed the reporting on how much of their uncompensated care is charity and how much is bad debt..more of the uncompensated care has been reclassfied as charity (more up front screening software) so when analyzing the numbers you need to get both bad debt and charity numbers and combine them and compare it to prior years..it may show a different picture