Do you remember when Kramer and Newman, of Seinfeld fame, decided to engage in a recycling scheme? They lived in New York but found out that returning bottles netted them 10 cents per bottle if they returned them to Michigan. Newman, a postal worker, used a Mother’s Day mail surge to drive out to Michigan and store a massive stack of bottles he collected so they could net a profit. As usual, the project was a disaster.

The takeaway from that story is that the return of bottles is something that is intended to keep bottles from cluttering our streets. The “bottle bill” is not a for-profit enterprise. The same may be happening with our nation’s non-profit hospitals, which are acting like for-profit enterprises.

Non-profits are set up to belong to the community at large – not a set of investors. Because a non-profit is set up to provide a public good, the goal is to provide a service to the community, and non-profits have the benefit of not paying taxes on the money they take in.

The law that relates to non-profit hospitals, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), “is a federal law that imposes specific obligations on........

© Townhall