Read original article at TheNationalDesk.com.

WASHINGTON (TND) — Billions of pandemic dollars were pocketed by top nonprofit hospitals.

CEO of Open The Books Adam Andrzejewski joined The National Desk’s Jan Jeffcoat on Friday to discuss the story.

“The top 20 nonprofit US hospitals' net assets increased from 200 billion to $324 billion. I think this is going to wrangle the American people,” he said. “This profiteering happened during the pandemic years.”

The 20 largest nonprofit hospitals have made incredible profits since the pandemic. Their combined assets were $124 billion in just three years, which is a rise of 62%.

“Our healthcare costs continue to rise as the average American family pays over $22,000 worth of health insurance premium costs each year and the prices of health care now are supposed to be transparent,” Andrzejewski said. “The Trump administration put forth the health care price transparency rule and to their credit, the Biden administration finalized that rule in 2021 but we found that 19 out of the top 20 us nonprofit hospitals racked up these big profits and they were not following federal health care price transparency rules. This is like playing baseball with one side, the patient that's us, we're blindfolded, and the other side is the hospitals and their rank there. They're putting tons of tons of score up on the board ranking, racking up big profit 10 of the $23 billion that were distributed in some of these COVID bailouts only two providers actually partially paid back that money.”