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The country’s largest private psychiatric hospital operator cherry-picks patients whose insurance will pay more, its finance chief said on an earnings call Wednesday.

It’s no secret that such hospitals, especially when run by for-profit companies, base admission decisions on how much they’ll get paid, but it’s rare to hear the practice described so bluntly. The comments came from Steve Filton, the chief financial officer of investor-owned Universal Health Services, a company that runs more than 300 behavioral health hospitals nationwide that handled just shy of 120,000 admissions in the three months that ended June 30.

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UHS has been “simply admitting patients whose insurance will pay us more,” Filton said on the company’s second quarter earnings call. “In an environment where we can only treat a limited number of patients, we can be more selective about who we treat and the fairness of what we think we’re being paid.”

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