IHA has released results from its latest hospital community benefit survey, which show Iowa hospitals provided a total of $1.2 billion in community benefit.  Community benefits are activities designed to improve health status and provide greater access to health care.  Along with uncompensated care (which is made up of both charity care and bad debt), community benefits include such services and programs as health screenings, support groups, counseling, immunizations, nutritional services and transportation programs. 

IHA also includes hospital losses to Medicare and Medicaid in its community benefit report.  This is because those losses – more than $310 million in 2009 – impact the hospitals’ ability to provide community benefit. 

Providing community benefits is an essential mission of non-profit community hospitals (117 of Iowa’s 118 hospitals are non-profit) and it is also required under federal laws that cover these hospitals’ tax-exempt status.  However, those laws do not specify an “amount” of community benefit from each hospital. 

Instead, hospitals are given the flexibility to determine how to meet the specific needs of their individual communities through these programs and services.  IHA believes that flexibility is important because community needs vary, not only from hospital to hospital and community to community, but from year to year – even from month to month.  A one-size-fits-all approach to community benefit would negate that flexibility and undermine the ability of hospital boards, administrators and employees to react to community needs in a timely fashion – if at all. 

In the coming weeks, IHA will be sharing more about the unique programs and services Iowa hospitals provide to their communities.