Non profits can be as greedy as any other organization.
Typically the money goes to wages for the leadership rather than profits to the owners.
The term ‘non-profit’ is one I find hilarious. With the smoke and mirrors of accounting and standard insurance company behaviour it can mean anything.
The directors can get bonuses, the cars can be upgraded and the conferences/holidays can get more impressive. It’s surprising that ‘non-profit’ doesn’t generate an eye-roll in more people.
From Wikipedia:
>"In 2003, of the roughly 3,900 nonfederal, short-term, acute care general hospitals in the United States, the majority—about 62 percent—were nonprofit. The rest included government hospitals (20 percent) and for-profit hospitals (18 percent)"
If you're doing accounting you have a ledger which balances down to the penny, and the expenses are spelled out in there with concrete amounts.
This is why that judge, as noted in the article, rejected the argument that the cost of an X-ray can be unknowable.
Healthcare companies would need to attribute things like depreciation of equipment (MRIs & CAT scanners for example), as well as doctor and nurse time (outside of operating rooms). These things are generally not tracked accurately, and many professionals are indignant at the idea that they could be.
That can't possibly be true of a hospital that charged $3000 for something on Tuesday, and $53000 for the same thing on Friday.
(Under reasonable assumptions like that Tuesday wasn't done at a $25K loss relative to breaking even; why would such be the case? And that they are busy with procedures, not simply doing a way overpriced procedure once every few weeks, and then just burning through cash in between that time.)