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How To Help Non-Profit Hospitals Serve Better, Lee Wynja

Celebration of Research

Whether to grant lucrative hospitals tax-exempt status is a controversial legal topic. Under the current law, non-profits must provide community benefit, a specific type of charitable giving, to maintain their tax-exempt status. The goal of this paper is to argue that hospitals’ community benefit requirement should be strengthened and further specified. I plan to show that the non-profit hospitals can afford charitable contributions to surrounding communities, but such contributions are a small share of their expenditures. I propose two easy steps can be made to make the community benefit requirement meaningful. First, the Community Needs Assessment should be done every …