Tuesday's Number: $490,796

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 seventeen new judgments to hospitals, doctors, or other medical providers totaling $292,895. 
• There were no satisfied judgments.
• And there were eight health care related bankruptcies, totaling $197,901.

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

• Crouse had twelve, for $200,706
• St Josephs had seven, totaling $146,938
• SUNY Upstate added six, for $143,152
• Community, part of Upstate, had no filings.

When there are any, I subtract the satisfied judgments from the overall total 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.