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Today, Save Our States is calling out the University of Miami Health System for accepting taxpayer subsidies, spending on questionable priorities, and failing patients. Why? Because hospitals and other healthcare providers are too important to avoid transparency. And because taxpayers and patients deserve accountability from these institutions.

The University of Miami is, in fact, primarily a healthcare provider. Most of its revenues come from its hospital and other medical providers. It benefits from being a “nonprofit,” which means that it pays no income tax and can help donors pay less taxes as well. But that doesn’t stop it from building lavish facilities, including one in Abu Dhabi, or paying some executives multi-million-dollar salaries.

If private businesses want to spend their own profits this way, that’s fine. But medical providers like the University of Miami receive direct and indirect subsidies from taxpayers.

Consider that the University’s hospital benefits from the federal 340B drug program, which allows certain medical providers to buy drugs at a deep discount without passing any of the savings on to patients or their insurance. This is all in addition to direct government subsidies and payments from Medicare and Medicaid.

Many Americans, especially small business owners, want to know: Why does healthcare and health insurance cost so much? Walk through a hospital’s luxury lobby, or the executives’ parking lot, and it starts to make sense. Hospitals set their own prices with little transparency. If executives decide they need luxury facilities, that becomes part of the cost of care—which becomes part of the cost of insurance. And when costs go up, hospitals go back to government asking for more taxpayer funds.

At Save Our States, we’re exposing this vicious cycle. Americans spend nearly twice as much on healthcare as people in other similar nations, amounting to about $5 trillion per year. A systemic lack of transparency, competition, and accountability in healthcare has allowed this spending to grow out of control even as many subsidized entities (mostly hospitals and insurance companies) demand more and more. 

Americans deserve to know where our money goes and what we’re getting for it—especially when it concerns our health.