Who Owns America's Hospitals?

Download the CMS hospital extracts cited on this page: plainhospital-hospital-ratings.csv and plainhospital-state-summary.csv (CMS public records · CC0).

Every ownership category

CMS records one ownership value per facility. These are its own categories, not groupings of ours.

Does ownership track with quality?

This table covers acute care hospitals only. Comparing every facility type at once would compare different populations rather than different owners: psychiatric hospitals rarely run an emergency department and are unevenly distributed across owners, so a mixed table mostly measures who owns psychiatric facilities. Averages are shown only where at least 30 facilities in the group carry a CMS rating, because a handful of rated hospitals cannot characterise an owner.

Across comparable groups the spread runs from 3.38 stars (voluntary non-profit - church, 197 rated) down to 2.75 (government - local, 124 rated). A star rating is CMS's own composite across its measure groups; this is an association between owner type and that composite, not evidence that ownership causes it.

Where for-profit hospitals concentrate

For-profit ownership is regional rather than national. States with fewer than 30 hospitals are excluded, because one facility moves a small state's share by several points.

Where these numbers come from

Every figure is counted at request time from the ownership field CMS publishes for each facility in CMS Hospital Compare / Care Compare. CMS publishes the field per hospital but no national rollup of it, which is why this page exists. Nothing here is estimated or carried from another source.

Two limits worth stating. CMS leaves a hospital unrated when its reporting volumes fall below CMS thresholds, so the rated counts above are smaller than the hospital counts and an unrated facility is never treated as a zero. And "Veterans Health Administration" appears here as an ownership value on facilities CMS files under their own facility type, so it is not comparable with the acute-care rows in the quality table. See also the national statistics and facility types.