More than half of the nation’s 5,000 hospitals operate as not-for-profit entities. In theory non-profit hospitals get an exemption from income tax, property tax, sales tax and get preferential financing because they provide a public service to the communities in which they operate. I worked for a large non-profit hospital system years ago and a financial analyst did the math and estimated our tax exclusion was worth something like $100 million a year. In return for the huge tax advantage all the hospital had to do was provide between 4% and 5% of net revenue in charity care for low-income patients.
Author: Devon Herrick
Death and Dying is a Growth Industry
Wherever baby boomers have gone they’ve strained institutions. Hospitals were filled to the brim with babies in the post WWII years through 1964. Schools were full and more had to be built. Colleges too were filled to capacity with the huge cohort of Americans born between 1946 and 1964. Nowadays approximately 73 million baby boomers are heading for old age. As boomers passed into late middle-age, they created a Golden Age of Rectums resulting in investors buying the practices of gastroenterologists. Investors are also buying nursing homes, which is a growth industry as boomers age. With a huge cohort of boomers slipping into old age, death is becoming a growth industry. Hospice care practices are being acquired by investors, as is presiding over boomers’ death. A new example appeared in Kaiser Health News and Fortune. Death is anything but a dying business as private equity cashes in on the $23 billion funeral home industry.
Is $2.8 Million a Fair Price for a Revolutionary Treatment?
There’s a new drug in town called Zynteglo. It’s used to treat a life-shortening blood disorder called beta thalassemia. This disorder reduces the ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen. It’s one of many genetics-based treatments destined to come to market in the next few years. Many of these treatments will be for cancer and other diseases for which there is no current treatment and require life-long therapies.
The Changing Demographics of Covid Deaths
People are still dying from Covid although who is dying and how many has changed as we enter the third year of the pandemic. Covid has always been a killer of elderly people, but it’s also taken a heavy toll on younger people who were considered essential workers and could not shelter in place. This is data from California:
From April 2020 through December 2021, Covid killed an average of 3,600 people a month, making it the third-leading cause of death in the state cumulatively for that time period, behind heart disease and cancer. From December 2020 through February 2021, it briefly overtook heart disease as the leading cause of death, taking the lives of more than 38,300 Californians in just three months. During its most recent peak, in January 2022, Covid took about 5,900 lives.