Community Reinvestment Comes to Health Care

I have no idea what the nonprofit community would do without Rick Cohen of the Nonprofit Quarterly: if there’s an issue affecting nonprofits he’ll have a fresh and useful perspective on it, and this article about the Community Health Needs Assessments required by the  Affordable Care Act is no exception.

What struck me most was Cohen’s point that CHNAs could do for health care what the Community Reinvestment Act did for real estate lending: make large institutions pay attention to the communities where they do business.  Whatever its weaknesses, CRA did make a serious dent in the once-common practice of red-lining, refusal to lend in poor neighborhoods, and we can expect CHNAs to make a similar change in the culture of nonprofit hospitals.  Simply providing an emergency room isn’t sufficient community service, and if a nonprofit hospital fails to grasp that it jeopardizes not only its Federal health-care dollars but the tax-favored status of the rest of its income.   We know that because the provision calls for enforcement by the IRS as well as the Department of Health and Human Services.

This sort of positive pressure from the legislature to improve community health services is far more effective than the purely negative pressure courts can supply by rejecting a hospital’s claim of charitable status (as in the Provena case in Illinois). Because the point isn’t to play “gotcha” with nonprofit hospitals—it’s to supply communities with the maximum benefit possible from the health care resources already available.

Once again the more you know about the Affordable Care Act, the better you like it.   And “Obamacare,” intended as an epithet, sounds more and more like a well-deserved tribute.

cross-posted with The Nonprofiteer: www.nonprofiteer.net

Author: Kelly Kleiman

Kelly Kleiman is a freelance writer on the arts, feminism, travel and social justice. Her reportage and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor, among other dailies; in magazines, including In These Times and Dance; in the alternative press; on the BBC; and on Chicago Public Radio, where she’s one of the “Dueling Critics” and a contributor to the Onstage Backstage theater blog. She is also a consultant to charities and editor and publisher of The Nonprofiteer, a blog about charity, philanthropy and nonprofit management. She holds undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Chicago.