Many hospitals are quite profitable. Many hospitals count the PROFIT they could have had instead of the true cost they incurred when discounting services or have people fail to pay. When my wife needed a minor operation (we had insurance) the hospital still wanted us to sign up for their credit card before she could be seen. They didn't tell us about this until an hour before the operation time. We instead wrote a check for the estimated amount, then received another bill for the revised fees.
Now all of this was at a hospital my wife used to work in in the IT section. Many an hour was spent running and re-running the numbers to make the hospital balance profit to losses. The hospital did receive government money to cover a portion of their losses so 'massaging' the numbers was a worthwhile endeavor.
The hospitals that are barely profitable are the smaller rural ones. They depend on Medicare patients as those with 'real' insurance go to the 'big city' for medical care. So far from screwing the provider, many providers depend on medicare patients to pay the bills. When their was talk of cutting medicare here in Oklahoma, when our GOP lead state legislature refused to increase medicare/aid coverage as part of the ACA, many rural hospitals complained. Many who work in small towns and rural areas don't have employer provided healthcare insurance, don't make enough to pay for individual insurance. Including these people in a single payer system would have boosted the income of many rural hospitals and helped keep them afloat.
Purcell OK lost it's small hospital due to the multi-state corporate HQ not seeing enough profit to keep it open and the small town couldn't raise the bribe to keep it operating...
The hospitals that are struggling are the very ones that could use the single payer system...
eace
