Tuesday's Number: $304,149

Tuesday is the day my local paper, the Syracuse Post-Standard, publishes the weekly business section. In addition to special features, tips from stock experts, budgeting advice and the like, we get the judgment and bankruptcy listings.

Since mid-2012, I’ve been tracking health care related filings. I include anything that is clearly a debt owed to a hospital, nursing home, physician or physician group, medical supplier, and so on; I do not include filings by insurance companies, many of which are so diversified it would not be a fair assumption that the filing is related to medical care or health insurance. 

• This week, there were 16 new judgments to hospitals, doctors, or other medical providers totaling $272,225. 
• There was one satisfied judgment, for $9,626. 
• And there were two health care related bankruptcies, totaling $41,550.

I also track filings for each of the four Syracuse hospitals. Here’s the breakdown for this week: 

• Crouse had three, totaling $31,978
• St Josephs had two, totaling $12,508
• SUNY Upstate had 11, totaling $256,962
• Community, part of Upstate, gets a ‘credit’ of $9,626 

There were two additional judgments, one for another hospital in the CNY region, and one for a medical practice in Florida, which make up the balance of $12,327.

I subtract the satisfied judgments from the overall totals and from the individual hospital totals; the likelihood is that they’ve already been incorporated into the numbers at some point now, since I’ve been tracking this for two and a half years.

The paper publishes only those accounts of at least $5,000.