By Tate Miller
The Center Square

Following a “Consumer Warning” report that shows a number of nonprofit hospitals promote DEI, gender ideology, and climate activism, the House Ways & Means Oversight Subcommittee held a hearing on how tax dollars are being spent by tax-exempt hospitals.

The hearing – entitled “Virtue Signaling vs. Vital Services: Where Tax-Exempt Hospitals are Spending Your Tax Dollars” – featured a number of witnesses, including Consumers’ Research’s executive director Will Hild.

Consumers’ Research is “the nation’s oldest consumer protection organization,” according to Hild.

Hild said at the hearing of his group’s Consumer Warning: “In the report that we put out, one of the common themes across all of the executive C-suites of these hospitals was saying that they only saw healthcare as part of their mission, or highlighting other things that they thought were core to their mission that a reasonable person would not consider part of providing healthcare.

“Increasingly, hospitals don’t see themselves as just healthcare providers or even as hospitals,” Hild said.

In June, Consumers’ Research released the Consumer Warning report revealing five hospitals they found to be funding “a partisan agenda pertaining to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), radical gender ideology, [or] climate activism,” with tax dollars, instead of “lowering costs and passing savings onto patients,” as The Center Square reported.

According to information obtained by The Center Square, Consumers’ Research’s report on “woke” nonprofit hospitals is what sparked the hearing this week.

Hild said at the hearing that “this misprioritization of politics over patients distracts hospitals from their core mission and can compromise the quality of treatment and increase costs, which can put consumers in serious physical and financial danger.”

“Some of these hospitals are betraying the fundamental agreement that they made when they took the tax-exempt status,” Hild said.

Hild added that “the whole concept of providing” a tax-exempt status is so that “instead of profits going to shareholders or executives, they would be reinvested back into healthcare.”

Hild also spoke of “gender-affirming care” on minors at the hearing, which is in step with Consumers’ Research’s report as it outlines transgender procedures hospitals have performed on children.

Hild testified at the hearing that “not only are [sex-change medical interventions] extraneous, they’re extremely harmful to the most vulnerable members of our society, which is, of course, children.”

“It’s both morally reprehensible that hospitals have engaged in this care, but also that they would try to claim that it’s a community benefit,” Hild said.

Hild said at the hearing that the nation is “at a time when these hospitals don’t provide any price transparency,” and that “they seem to be acting as if they’ve run out of ways to invest in the provision of care in a better, or more cost-affordable way.”

“If that’s the case, then maybe they don’t need these subsidies,” Hild said.

In addition to the report on woke ideology in hospitals, Consumers’ Research sent a letter to President Donald Trump, a letter to Congress, and letters to the governors where the five hospitals in question are.

When previously reached, two of the five hospitals named in the Consumer Warning refuted some of the statements made about them in the report.