A couple of months ago, I wrote about how my hometown Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center has been aggressively promoting sex change treatments for minors, according to medical watchdog Do No Harm’s Stop the Harm Database. More recently, a campaign targeting Cleveland Clinic as perhaps the most “woke” hospital in American revealed the role it played in advancing a radical transgender ideology, including by administering hundreds of “gender-affirming hormone therapy” and puberty blocking treatments on minors.
But Cleveland Clinic’s woke policies don’t end there. The report details a litany of woke initiatives, including LGBTQ+ exclusive clinics, multiple minority-only health programs, “green” energy goals, and efforts to embed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) into “everything that [they] do.” It all begs the question, where is the money to fund these ideologically driven programs coming from?
Recent reporting from Townhall.com exposed how a number of hospitals have boasted that they diverted funds from a government program called 340B to offset the cost of hormone therapy and "sex reassignment" surgery – including for children – as a way around President Trump’s Executive Order to cut off federal funding that supports the medical “transitioning” of minors.
The 340B Drug Pricing Program allows eligible hospitals to benefit from deep drug discounts, which are intended to help them deliver healthcare services to uninsured and low-income patients, including in rural areas. The program mandates that drug companies sell the drugs at cut-rate prices, but 340B hospitals, on the other hand, can charge whatever they wish. They are under no obligation to pass savings on to poorer patients the program ostensibly benefits, and Cleveland has admitted it doesn’t.
And for non-profit hospitals, 340B is a real money maker. In its first year in the program Cleveland Clinic raked in $136 million, contributing to its $1.3 billion profit in 2020.
The problem, as Townhall’s reporting makes clear, is the 340B program is highly opaque and has little to no oversight. Consequently, hospitals can use the windfall they pull in from drug discounts for pretty much whatever they wish – to fund programs like DEI or climate activism, or as some have done, so-called gender-affirming care. Becoming America’s wokest hospital, no doubt, came at significant cost.
Cleveland Clinic is far from being a poor rural hospital or a struggling inner city medical facility barely able to make ends meet, as one might imagine the recipients of government largesse to be. It pulled in $11.7 billion in total revenues through Q3 2024, and has amassed a dizzying $16.6 billion in net assets.
Contributing to that bottom line is an array of payment adjustments and add-ons for treating Medicare patients, as well as supplemental payments for Medicaid. In 2020, during the height of COVID-19, supplemental funds from Washington actually resulted in a 17% increase in the hospital’s revenue from the year before, nearly tripling its operating income.
The Clinic also receives money from various federal grants. According to a report from the Daily Wire, the Lerner College of Medicine received nearly $170 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in grant funding. Cleveland Clinic received an additional $1.2 million grant from NIH to boost Cleveland’s “number of minority scientists.”
But its flippant spending is not limited to ideological initiatives. On its website, Cleveland Clinic boasts in-house art curators, rooftop yoga sessions, and expensive out-of-state concierge services. In 2023, Cleveland Clinic partnered with the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers to build a state-of-the-art athletic training facility. This hardly fits the profile of an entity struggling to “stretch scarce federal resources.”
Such profligate spending may help explain why Cleveland Clinic’s savings on drugs are not passed along to its patients in this age of runaway healthcare costs. It is unfortunate that despite its massive profits—padded with money from government grants and programs like 340B—Cleveland Clinic consistently prioritizes woke ideological initiatives and lavish offerings above basic patient care.
Patients' physical health must always come first, but hospitals cannot and should not ignore the impact their policies have on patients’ financial health. If large systems like Cleveland Clinic are going to claim dependence on aid from the federal government, they owe the public a great deal more transparency about how they are using that money.
J. Kenneth Blackwell is the former Ohio Secretary of State and Mayor of Cincinnati.
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