Baptist Health of Little Rock, which includes five hospitals in Arkansas, reported to the Internal Revenue Service a $40 million loss in 2008.
The loss was actually closer to $70 million in 2008, but the IRS doesn't require as extensive reporting as an audit would, said Baptist's CFO Bob Roberts.
"The IRS Form 990 is for our tax-exempt entities and the audit report ... includes a lot other of our entities," Roberts said. "For IRS, we don't report any of the unrealized losses from the stock market on our investments [and] that was in that $70 million number."
Still, the 2008 loss was blamed on the same issues that hit other hospitals in Arkansas and across the country: rising charity care, bad debt and uninsured patients, Roberts said.
In 2007, the system reported a loss of $17 million to the IRS.
The system's total revenue increased from $1.9 billion to $2.1 billion in 2008, the IRS report said. But its expenses increased from $1.95 billion in 2007 to $2.1 billion in 2008.
Roberts projected the hospital system would break even or have a small loss for 2009.
"We're hoping for a significant improvement from the 2008 results," he said.
The five hospitals in the system were: Baptist Health Medical Centers in Arkadelphia, Heber Springs, Little Rock and North Little Rock and Baptist Health Rehabilitation Institute in Little Rock.
Baptist Health also released a report called 2009 Economic Contribution Study, which was done by the University of Arkansas, Division of Agriculture, Cooperative Extension Services.
The study showed that Baptist Health generates economic output of nearly $1.4 billion, creates nearly 14,000 jobs with a combined income of more than $600 million in annual payroll. It also contributes 1 percent to the gross state product and 2.2 percent in central Arkansas.
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