Uncompensated care data came from the VHI financial information database. Although charity care is conceptually more appealing to study when examining care delivered to economically disadvantaged patients, we used uncompensated care (the sum of charity care and bad debt). The reason that we and earlier researchers examined uncompensated care rather than just charity care is that individual hospitals differ widely in their policies for classifying patients as charity care or bad debt cases. That is, some of the variation in reported charity care may be due to measurement issues rather than true differences in indigent care provision. The sum of bad debt and charity care should not be affected by this measurement problem (Davidoffetal., 2000; Rosko, 2004b; Thorpeetal., 2001). We constructed a variable that we called uncompensated care admissions per bed. Specifically, this variable equaled total uncompensated care charges divided by the hospital’s average charge per admission, which is then divided by the number of hospitalbeds. This variable is similar to the one developed by Banks, Paterson, and Wendel (1997) and Gaskin (1997). By standardizing this measure relative to hospital beds, the provision of uncompensated care across different sized hospitals can be compared. A high uncompensated care provider is defined as a hospital with uncompensated care admissions per bed that are greater than the mean value of this variable for all Virginia hospitals across all study years.