Cooking New York City’s Not-for-Profit Books

There is something too neat, almost too polished, about the way not-for-profit hospitals tell their financial story, a narrative carefully plated for public consumption with billions in “community benefits,” assurances of selfless care for the underserved, and a tidy justification for billions more in tax breaks, which on paper reads like altruism at scale but in practice often feels more like accounting.