The North Carolina Hospital Association is considering new guidelines that would ask the state’s 107 hospitals to report the amount of community benefit they provide in terms of costs rather than charges, according to the Triangle Business Journal. Many hospitals give the full retail price of a procedure rather than what it costs them in equipment and physician time when reporting how much free care they provide for indigent patients. Some experts say the practice is misleading because many patients pay discounted fees that are negotiated through insurance carriers. Ken Morris, chief financial officer of the Duke University Health System, was quoted in the Journal as saying that the new guidelines are “long overdue.”
