Tuesday's Number: $173,856

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 fourteen new judgments to hospitals, doctors, or other medical providers totaling $190,022.

·         There were two satisfied judgments, for $16,166.

·         And there were no health care related bankruptcies.

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

·         Crouse had five, totaling $40,847

·         St Joe’s had one, for $20,815

·         SUNY Upstate had nine, totaling $122,970

·         Community General, a part of Upstate, also had none.

There was one judgment filed by a surgery center which account for the remaining $10,776.

This year, I am subtracting 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.