CA Health & Safety Code Section 101983

The Legislature finds and declares that, while there continues to be a need to focus on the deficiencies in the health care system and on corrective reform measures that might be taken, there is also need for focus on the enhancement of its strengths. Existing philanthropic support for health facilities and clinics is a strength that must be preserved and enhanced under any reform measure for all of the following reasons:

(a)

Philanthropy imbues members of the community with a sense of pride in their voluntary nonprofit health facilities and clinics and creates a setting in which members of the community are willing to devote time and effort to improve health care available in the community in a way that government regulation could never replace.

(b)

Philanthropy allows voluntary nonprofit institutions to conduct research and to engage in other innovative efforts to improve health care in California.

(c)

Philanthropy provides required discretionary dollars for voluntary nonprofit institutions, that, in part, substitute for the absence of profits.

(d)

Philanthropy allows hospitals to replace worn out and obsolete facilities when, in a period of high inflation, historical costs accumulated through depreciation are totally insufficient to provide for the replacement.

(e)

Philanthropy pays for necessary expenditures that otherwise would have to be paid by patients or by government.

(f)

Philanthropy may be discouraged by certain shortsighted actions of administrative agencies that, while purporting to serve a short-term purpose, seriously deter the vast benefits to the health care field inuring directly from philanthropy and voluntarism.

(g)

Recent amendments to the federal tax laws to broaden the use of the standard deduction also have the effect of eliminating important incentives for philanthropy.