Nonprofit hospital draws backlash for Super Bowl ad

The big picture: The ad played nationwide — alongside those for automakers, beer and snack foods — and likely cost upward of $8 million, according to TV ad impact measurement company iSpot.

• It featured a group of doctors struggling to complete a passing play, then getting words of encouragement from former New York Giants star Victor Cruz as a narrator intoned, "Not the best football team, but the best health system."
• "This feels like a terrible idea when healthcare providers are constantly telling Congress that their reimbursements are too low," one health tech entrepreneur posted on his LinkedIn page Sunday.

"As the top-ranked academic medical center for quality care in the United States and as a leader in medical breakthroughs, such as transplant medicine, NYU Langone Health chose to highlight our unique team-driven, integrated health system on a broader stage," said Steve Ritea, the health system's senior director of media relations.

State of play: Hospitals provide crucial health care services, and about one-third of America's federal health care spending goes to hospitals.

• But as more procedures are being done in less-expensive outpatient settings for the same price paid to hospitals, Congress has started to look at ways to lower what the government pays hospitals.
• There's also bipartisan pressure to enforce nonprofit hospitals' responsibility to provide charity care in exchange for their no-tax status, and to more closely examine a drug-purchasing program that many such facilities can take advantage of to get steep discounts on pharmaceuticals.
• Meanwhile, hospitals continue to fight proposed changes to the way Medicare pays them, saying the proposals would imperil patient care. Many continue to ask the federal government to increase Medicare payment rates for hospitals.

Reality check: Hospital advertising is not new. NYU Langone has aired Super Bowl ads in the past, and it's not the only hospital to have bought advertising during the Big Game.

• Previous hospital Super Bowl ads have also drawn criticism. The Washington Post published an op-ed from an emergency room doctor in 2023 arguing that hospitals should invest their marketing money in improving staffing instead.
• NYU Langone operates at a 4% margin, according to its most recent financial report. That's just below the 4.4% aggregate operating margin for nonprofit hospitals across the country in 2023, per KFF.

Between the lines: NYU Langone is reportedly among blue-state hospitals pulling back on gender-affirming care for kids in order to protect their access to federal funding following President Trump's recent executive order on the topic.

The bottom line: "It's not to say that this specific hospital system is the worst of the worst actors," said Darbin Wofford, senior policy advisor at center-left think tank Third Way.

• But now when hospitals "go to Congress to ask for even more subsidies, hopefully there's a little bit more scrutinization over why they need more money from taxpayers and patients," he told Axios.
• And if hospitals want to attract more patients, lowering prices and contracting into more insurance networks is a better way to do that than national advertising, Wofford added.