Study Says Hospitals Among Top Employers The Report Looked At Economic Impact. One Part Dealt With Their Tax-exempt Status.

A study released last week by the Pennsylvania Economy League indicates that hospitals are big business in Philadelphia and its suburbs.

Hospitals, in fact, directly employ 232,00 people in Philadelphia, Montgomery, Delaware, Chester and Bucks Counties. Other industries employ 110,000 people who indirectly serve hospitals. The two figures together indicate that in some of the counties hospitals create or help create more jobs than any other industry. In other counties, they are the second-largest employer.

In Bucks County, hospitals have more workers on the payroll than any other private industry except restaurants and bars. In 1989, they employed about 7,500, and their payrolls topped $150 million. An additional 9,400 were employed by industries - notably pharmaceutical companies - that peddle their wares to the hospitals.

Hospital and medical workers not only make money in Bucks County, they spend it here, too - about $172 million in 1989, according to the study.

The Pennsylvania Economy League is a not-for-profit, nonpartisan public- policy watchdog group. The Delaware Valley Hospital Council paid the league about $40,000 to conduct the study, which examines the economic impact of hospitals on the areas they serve.

A healthy section of the study examines hospitals' theoretical tax liability.

The six Bucks hospitals examined - Doylestown Hospital; Quakertown Community Hospital; Saint Mary Hospital of Langhorne; Grand View Hospital, Sellersville; Lower Bucks Hospital, Bristol; Delaware Valley Medical Center, Langhorne - are listed as not-for-profit organizations, and pay no property taxes to any local taxing body. If they were forced to pay, their total tax liability would be $5.5 million, according to the study.

Council members worry, however, that the not-for-profit status for hospitals is no longer sacrosanct. A court challenge waged by a local government agency against an Allentown hospital's status and several similar challenges waged in Montgomery County threaten the hospitals' freedom from property taxes.

To maintain a not-for-profit status, a hospital must operate free from profit motive; render a substantial portion of its services for free; benefit needy people, and provide health-care services that government would otherwise be obliged to finance.

Leonard Karp, council vice president for government relations, said that such challenges were easy to file and costly to defend.

The study indicates that Bucks County hospitals spent about $88 million a year in free or reduced-cost medical services for the elderly and indigent. Of that, however, about $50 million was passed on to paying customers.

Hospitals also provide about $2.6 million each year in community programs and education such as disease screenings.

Council officials argued that if county hospitals were to pay $5.5 million in property taxes, they would have to cut back on their charitable contributions.