I found this article on a situation involving a non-profit hospital's going out of business interesting. The hospital in question is St. Francis Hospital & Health Center in the Chicago suburb of Blue Island.

The hospital has recently announced that it will close its doors because providing for the poor is too big a drain on its parent, SSM Health Care, a Catholic-run organization that operates 20 hospitals and makes a profit, partly because it has tax-exempt status.

In Illinois, Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan is pushing for ways to require hospitals to provide a specific percentage of revenue as charity care, or information on the discounts hospitals provide for some patients.

Ultimately, however, it seems unlikely that more regulations will really do much to improve access to health care for the poor or anyone else. The real question is, "What obligations do tax exempt hospitals have to serve the community" as opposed to being a viable operation?

Even without serving a single poor person, hospitals obviously "provide a community benefit," but is it worth giving non-profit status to certain hospitals and, if so, should they be expected to do more than others? Those are difficult issues for sure, but burdening non-profit hospitals with more regulations is not going to help matters. Answering important questions about how to justify non-profit status might.