Shocked. Shocked I say.
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
320 points (99.4% liked)
News
22890 readers
3594 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Went there twice because it’s the nearest, thinking the first poor experience was a fluke. Now I’d rather die on the drive to a better hospital.
To be fair though, this is a pervasive problem with nonprofits. While it wouldn’t help in this case, I recommend researching nonprofits through something like Charity Watch before donating.
Providence Health was officially dinged for this. The nonprofit aspect is such a joke.
The nonprofit requirement allows for feeding profits back into the institution. This can come in the form of investing in employees. Instead of investing in workers who directly impact patients by issuing bonuses, the CEOs get bonuses.
Instead of forgiving bills for the poorest patients, they offer payment plans instead.
It doesn’t matter how well you manage and save your money. In your geriatric years, those hospital CEOs will take it all.
For a rising number of people, death comes when you run out of money.
Taking all of someone's money at the end of their life is a great way to prevent generational wealth from accumulating.
So the CEOs are going to be punished, right?
Absolutely! They’ll be punished with a golden parachute for such terrible PR.
this happens in hospice organizations also. the non profits pay themselves far more, and are fare more lax on wasting resources than for-profit companies who actually have to account for their behavior.
but you still get people who think non-profit == good peoples. no, just no.
Non-profit still means they can make a profit, they have the freedom to move the bar and give their executives extra pay while still technically not making extra money
right, which leads to negative outcomes for their patients. its anecdotal, but i have personally witnessed this in multiple states
Well regulated non-profits would be better than well regulated for profit, but in the current capitalist economies where both are undertegulated they end up being the same thing. Especially when all the big companies get tax breaks so they end up the same as a non-profit as far as taxes collected are concerned.
501(c)(3) corporations need to have executive pay regulated in both absolute and relative (to median worker pay, as well as to the company’s overall revenue) terms
If only someone would bribe the government enough to enforce that law
Those numbers are extremely strange 1-8 percent to charitable care for a non profit? Shouldn’t it be 65-75 percent? What am I missing that they are spending the vast majority of the funding on besides the ceo salary?
First, a misunderstanding on what is non-profit vs charity. Non-profit doesn't mean they're a charity. It means their primary goal isn't profit for its owners. A charity is always non-profit, but a non-profit is not necessarily a charity. A charity is an entity whose primary purpose is to provide resources to its mission and therefore spends into negatives if not for donations.
Accounting is a complex topic. Unless you're willing to delve into an organization's finances in detail and have capacity to understand it in context, it's best to just say: I don't know shit. That includes me. Should something be 65-75%? I have no fucking clue. Because we don't know what these numbers entail. We don't know how they operate and we don't know how we're diving these percentages.
Take american red cross for example. An excellent charity with great reputation, full audits, independent board members, etc. https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/530196605 You can view their financial score on the charity navigator (easier to understand then suddenly looking at annual reports). Scroll down to Financial Metrics and then look at Program Expense: Ratio. 90.64% (2022). This is the kind of number you're expecting to see. 3.2% goes to administration and 6.2% goes to fundraising. Seems good. Right?
But what does 90% of the program expense really include? It likely includes whole lot of complexities you aren't thinking of immediately. Like logistics cost of delivering goods in need. Some of those are expenses which will go to for-profit 3PL companies. Necessary cost, of course. It also would include salaries of any professionals or boots on the ground that's going to do the labor. It's going to include costs of anything they need to buy to operate. Etc. At the end of the day, we have no real understanding of how much money is actually going to someone in need versus how much money is needed to do get to that point. That will include lot of things we have no idea that even exists. Regardless of complexities, they spent 90% of their money into funding the program as a whole. So we need to understand that we're comparing a single thing here versus a concept of a whole.
But the biggest takeaway here is that above is a spending ratio from the COST. Not revenue.
The number that we're seeing in 1-8% are charitable case divided by revenue, not something they spent. So these are a calculation of reduction of revenue due to charity. If a hospital spends $1M on a new MRI machine and a doctor to operate it (I have no idea what they cost, just giving numbers here). Collect $1M from paying patients. Not collect $1000 from charitable cases. Then the ratio of revenue would be 0.1% and profit would be 0. But what does that mean from a cost perspective...? 100%. 100% of your cost and revenue goes into program. Would that mean the hospital is doing a fantastic charitable job? Hell no.
The program expense ratio metric is completely meaningless if it's not a full on charity. Quite frankly, most for-profit business would be in 90% range as well.