Compliance Trends with Hospital Charity Care Requirements

Study Background: The Affordable Care Act (ACA) established new requirements for 501(c)(3) hospitals pertaining to their charity care policies. Hospitals self-report data related to these requirements on Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 990, which is submitted on an annual basis. Researchers from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and the University of California, Berkeley, recently published a study on hospitals’ compliance with these requirements in the New England Journal of Medicine (the “NEJM Study”) based on their analysis of IRS Form 990 data from 2012.