A new study found that nonprofit hospitals that compensated board members in 2019 offered less charity care than hospitals that did not pay board members.
From 2011 to 2019, average trustee compensation across all nonprofit hospitals increased by 46%, while the average charity-care-to-expense ratio dropped by 21%.
This association "suggests that trustees' motivations and activities, as well as the underlying organizational priorities in some trustee-compensating hospitals, may have deviated from hospitals' stated charitable missions," study authors write.Nearly two-thirds of more than 2,000 nonprofit hospitals analyzed as of 2019 still don't compensate their trustees.
At top-ranked hospitals, board members most commonly have backgrounds in finance, not health care, a February