April 25 (Bloomberg) -- Consider the tax-exempt hospital.
Traditionally, these hospitals have offered free or
subsidized medical treatment for poor patients. Over the past
half-century, however, as the federal government has taken to
paying for health care -- via Medicare, Medicaid and, now, the
Affordable Care Act -- policy makers have tried to steer the
nation’s 2,900 tax-exempt hospitals away from charity medical
treatment for individuals and toward the kinds of preventive
public-health services that are believed to lower health-care
costs generally: community blood-pressure and mammography
screening, clinics for weight loss and smoking cessation, and so
on.
