ChristianaCare is sitting on rising profits while the amount of free care it provides to the poor hasn’t budged in years. Spotlight Delaware reports that in 2023, the hospital system spent less than one percent of its budget on charity care, even as it pulled in nearly half a billion dollars in profits.

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, this isn’t just an accounting problem. It’s a rupture in relationship. A hospital isn’t just bricks, beds, and balance sheets; it’s a living part of the community’s ecosystem of care. When a hospital grows richer but keeps its doors closed to those in need, it broadcasts a clear message: our growth matters more than your survival.

That message lands in nervous systems as betrayal, shame, and alienation. People stop trusting the place they’re supposed to turn to for safety. They delay care, avoid care, or internalize the belief that their needs don’t matter. The relational damage spreads to families, to neighborhoods, to every system downstream that has to carry the weight ChristianaCare refuses to shoulder.

This isn’t “neutral business practice.” It’s relational neglect at scale. It weakens the social fabric, erodes trust, and leaves the most vulnerable even more isolated. A hospital that hoards resources while rationing compassion isn’t practicing medicine, but abandonment.

This is the same institution that protects doctors who commit harm. I know. Two of them greatly harmed me under the guise of care, and ChristianaCare shields them from accountability.

A true hospital would act like part of the community, not like a fortress. It would invest its surplus in co-regulation: outreach clinics, debt relief, sliding scale care, and real partnership with the people it claims to serve. It would own the harm it’s caused and change its posture from corporate expansion to communal stewardship.

Until then, ChristianaCare’s glossy mission statements are just another lie.