SAN FRANCISCO — Today the Director of San Francisco’s Public Health Department, Mitch Katz, applauded a recent move by the United States Senate Finance Committee to investigate whether the Sutter corporation deserves its huge tax breaks while providing low levels of care to the uninsured. The Senate action further reinforces what elected leaders and community members throughout Northern California have been saying for years, that Sutter acts more like a for-profit than a non-profit.
“I feel the questions being raised are well overdue,” said San Francisco Director of Public Health Mitch Katz. “The San Francisco Dept of Public Health’s Charity Care Report has shown that California Pacific Medical Center, a Sutter Hospital, received significantly more from its tax deductions than the amount of money it provides in charity care. I feel strongly that non-profit hospitals have an obligation to provide charity care. It seems reasonable to me that a hospital would provide at least as much as charity care as they are receiving in tax-free benefits.”
The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Chuck Grassley, sent a strongly worded letter to Sutter asking it for information and documentation on 46 different topics, including levels of charity care, executive compensation, billing practices, treatment of the uninsured, tax exempt status, for-profit affiliations and a host of other issues. Sutter is one of only 10 hospital systems in the nation to receive the information request, and the only system in California. This process will require Sutter to divulge extensive, detailed information about topics for which it is has already been severely criticized, such as abusive debt-collection practices.
Some of the questions in Senator Grassley’s letter include: ” . . .Please provide a breakdown of your charity care expenditures . . . Please explain what is the economic benefit to your hospital of charging uninsureds the high chargemaster rate when uninsured people generally have less of an ability to pay hospital charges and do in fact generally pay only a fraction of what has been charged? Does this benefit justify your action particularly in light of your not-for-profit tax-exempt status? . . . Please identify how many lawsuits you have filed against uninsured patients for the current year and the preceding five calendar years . . . Please identify any times you have sold debt owed to the hospital from uninsured patients to other companies for collection . . .”
To speak to other elected leaders about the Senate investigation into the Sutter corporation, call the number below.
With over 140,000 members throughout the state in the hospital, homecare and nursing home industries, SEIU United Healthcare Workers-West is the largest and fastest-growing healthcare workers union in the Western U.S. Our mission is to achieve high quality healthcare for all.
CONTACT: Dave Bates, +1-510-773-8950
