Hospital charity care policies and the California health care safety net.

Estimates of charity care expenditures provide a quantitative measure of hospitals' commitment to expanding access to the medically uninsured in their communities but fail to provide information about the subset of uninsured who benefit or the gaps in public insurance programs' coverage that are filled by these charity care programs. This brief provides an overview of a study, conducted for the California HealthCare Foundation, that gathered information on California hospitals' charity care policies. The objective of the study was to identify the eligibility criteria hospitals use for free care and to understand the gaps in Medi-Cal, California's version of Medicaid, and county indigent program coverage that these providers are capable of filling.