Datasets:

referencesource
/

state-hospital-financial-assistance-thresholds

pretty_name: State minimum standards for hospital financial assistance (charity care)
license: other
license_name: source-terms-cited
license_link: https://referencesource.org/state-hospital-financial-assistance-thresholds/
language:
  - en
tags:
  - reference-data
  - provenance
  - referencesource-org
configs:
  - config_name: default
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/records.jsonl

State minimum standards for hospital financial assistance (charity care)

Canonical, always-current version: https://referencesource.org/state-hospital-financial-assistance-thresholds/ Machine-readable: https://referencesource.org/state-hospital-financial-assistance-thresholds/data.json — this mirror is a point-in-time copy.

Last verified: 2026-08-26
Stale after: 2027-02-22 (past this date, prefer the canonical copy — it re-verifies on a cadence this snapshot does not)
Records: 14

The income floor a US state's own law forces hospitals to meet before they may bill a patient — stated as a percentage of the federal poverty level, taken one state at a time from that state's statute, never from a compilation. Federal law (IRS section 501(r)) makes every nonprofit hospital publish a financial assistance policy but sets no income threshold at all, so the only enforceable number is the one the state writes down, and roughly half the states write none. Where a state does set one it is genuinely different everywhere: Connecticut sets no free-care line at all but forbids a hospital collecting more than its own cost from an uninsured patient at or below 250% of the poverty income guidelines; California a single 400% line; Oregon free below 200% then a statutory sliding scale to 400%; Maryland free below 200% with six named discount bands running to 500% on financial hardship; Washington 300% free for hospitals in large health systems and 200% for the rest, which replaced a flat 200%/400% rule in 2022 and is still published the old way on most consumer sites. Each record also carries the deadline to apply, which is its own fifty-one-way fragment and the single most consequential thing here — Maryland allows a change of circumstances within 240 days of the first bill, Washington allows an application within two years of the date of service, and federal 501(r) sets 240 days for nonprofit hospitals only. Missing that window is how an unpayable bill becomes a collection account and then a credit event. Answers 'does my state make hospitals give free care and at what income', 'what is the charity care income limit in [state]', 'how long do I have to apply for hospital financial assistance in [state]', 'does my state's rule apply to a for-profit hospital', and 'is the Washington charity care limit 200% or 300%' (both — it depends on the hospital, since 2022). No federal agency publishes this; the one national assembly, a 2021 National Consumer Law Center report, is five years old and its URL now returns 404 at the address KFF still cites, and the Community Catalyst state pages that used to hold it are gone. Page one of a search for it is content-mill sites with no statutory citation, at least one of which states Washington's superseded rule as current.

Provenance — what every record carries

Every record carries source (the URL the value was read from) and source_quote (a verbatim quote from that page stating it). A value you cannot check against its page is indistinguishable from an invented one; these can all be checked. Each record is also individually addressable on the canonical site at its url.

Licence position

Facts extracted from state statutes and legislative websites; statutory text is not copyrightable and each record links to and quotes its own source section

Facts are not copyrightable; what this dataset takes from each source is a fact plus a short attributed quote linking back to the page that states it.

Sources

Fields

See any record in data/records.jsonl — field names are self-describing, and the canonical page for each record renders them with labels: https://referencesource.org/state-hospital-financial-assistance-thresholds/