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Think tank says Cleveland Clinic still among hospitals with highest disparity between tax breaks and community benefit

The Lown Hospitals Index 2022 Community Benefit ranking found the Clinic had the fourth-highest fair share deficit among U.S. nonprofit hospitals at $611 million. The fair share deficit is the difference between the estimated amount a hospital system receives in tax breaks versus the amount it directly invests into its community. More

Advocate, Northwestern hospitals haven’t spent their ‘fair share’ on charity, new report says

“It’s an important issue because our nonprofit hospitals really are participants in a social compact,” said Dr. Vikas Saini, president and CEO of the Lown Institute, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit. “This is now a big business, there are many many dollars flowing through. It behooves us to understand what the tax exemption is doing, what it’s for and whether it’s still a fair dispensation.” More

Surgeons work to keep fading American shopping malls alive

The health care industry will soon be offering elective surgery where Americans once bought their underpants. “There is a certain logic to it,” said Vikas Saini, a cardiologist who is head of the Lown Institute, a think tank. He sees it as part of a general trend “towards the commercialisation of healthcare”. Dr Saini thinks that malls in wealthier suburbs might hold a particular allure for hospitals. “The most desirable patient is the upscale patient who is healthy, who has commercial insurance and who can get some kind of elective surgery, like their knee or something, that’s very lucrative,” he said. More

‘An ever-spiraling upward cycle’: nonprofit hospital CEOs paid 8 times more than average worker

The pandemic has brought hospital finances and pay scales to greater attention as burned out healthcare workers call for higher pay after two years of COVID-19, though hospital CEOs have faced scrutiny for years over sky-high compensation. "Today, hospital boards compare the compensation of their CEOs not to other community-based nonprofits but to their for-profit publicly traded hospital CEO peers, who themselves are compared to leaders in the largest industrial and financial companies trading on Wall Street," the researchers said. "Since many boards set CEO salary by obtaining 'comparable' salary data, this becomes an ever-spiraling upward cycle." More

Lown Institute: 7 questions to guide decisions on hospital CEO pay

Amid the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an opportunity for boards of nonprofit hospitals to rethink how their CEOs are paid, particularly compared to the staff at their facilities, representatives with the Lown Institute wrote in a Feb. 10 article published in Health Affairs. The Lown Institute, a nonpartisan healthcare think tank, examined the gap between the pay of hospital staff and the CEO, as well as the implications of it. More

After China, Mass General Brigham is hungry to grow back home

MGB's continuing expansion raises questions about the underlying values of nonprofit hospitals. If you’re a hospital with tax-exempt status, “you could be asking, ‘what are you doing locally for the community?‘ ” Saini told me. “Or, you can figure out where there are paying customers and build a clinic.” On one hand, MGB simply embodies the market-driven spirit of American health care: “They have to find revenue, and the revenue is fragmented in terms of geography and social class,” said Saini. More