Non-profit hospitals in New Mexico are required to invest in initiatives in the communities they serve as part of their "community benefit" that helps maintain their tax-exempt status, and some of these benefits include nutrition classes and substance abuse care, according to The New Mexico Political Report.
Because New Mexico does not lay out a requirement on how much hospitals must spend to keep their tax-exempt status, a recent analysis noted that non-profit hospitals across the state are spending "substantially less" than non-profit hospitals in other states. The amount they are spending is also less than what they are receiving from the tax-exemptions.
The news agency noted that non-profit hospitals are required to document their community benefit expenditures, but because that information is usually extremely complex, no one really knows what they're actually spending.
“The state and the hospitals need to find a way to make that information more available to folks," Deputy Secretary of the Human Services Department Russel Toal told the Political Report. "To make sure that hospitals are holding their own, and also that they’re not making excessive profits."
The news agency reported that nationwide, non-profit hospitals in 2014 averaged 8.1 percent in operating expenses, but New Mexico non-profit hospitals are spending substantially less than that. Albuquerque's Presbyterian Hospital reported between 4.13 percent and 5.02 percent in 2014 operating expenses, and Christus St. Vincent Medical Center in Santa Fe reported 3.94 percent.
Last year, the New Mexico state legislature passed a measure that increased the rates for which clinicians can bill Medicaid and, at the same time, another measure passed that required them to pay their state gross receipt tax at 40 percent the rate paid by for-profit businesses, according to the Political Report. State. Rep. Jason Harper (R-Rio Rancho), a tax expert, told the news agency that while the measures were not directly coupled together, it was basically understood that they would be done together.
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