Patterns of Financing for the Largest Hospital Systems in the United States (Funding) (Illustration‪)‬

This final column examines specific financing patterns for the nation's five largest investor-owned hospital systems and the five largest voluntary hospital systems. These ten systems account for more than 10 percent of the total revenue in the U.S. acute care hospital industry. While these systems clearly represent a biased sample in terms of financing patterns, their importance as a bellwether of things to come for the industry is worth exploring. We identified the systems using Modern Healthcare's 2004 list of the largest healthcare systems in the nation, ranked by net patient revenue: