Hospitals face financial squeeze

Wall Street Journal (subscription required), April 30, 2008

More than half of U.S. hospitals aren't seeing enough patients to provide sufficient revenue to fund operations and are "teetering on the brink of insolvency" or already are insolvent, according to a study by restructuring firm Alvarez & Marsal. More than 2,000 of the nearly 3,900 acute-care hospitals the firm studied don't make a profit treating patients. Nearly 750 hospitals that do turn a profit still don't have enough to reinvest in improvements or other essential expenditures, according to the study.