Tuesday's Number: $449,029

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 26 new judgments to hospitals, doctors, or other medical providers totaling $449,029. 
• There were no satisfied judgments. 
• 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 two, totaling $15,536 
• St Joe’s also had two, for $22,862 
• SUNY Upstate had 22, totaling $410,631 
• Community General, a part of Upstate, also had none.

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.