Tuesday's Number: $462,451

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 30 new judgments to hospitals, doctors, or other medical providers totaling $525,597. 
• There were seven satisfied judgments, totaling $89,986. 
• And there were three health care related bankruptcies, for $26,840.

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

• Crouse had 17, totaling $19,236
• St Joe's had three, totaling $38,278
• SUNY Upstate had 17, totaling $390,270
• Community, a part of SUNY Upstate, had none 

The remaining $14,667 in new judgments were for a surgical center and a physical therapy group.  

This year, I’m 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. That explains the very low number for Crouse this week; all of the satisfied judgments were credited against their new judgment total. 

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