alt Hacker NewsNot the parent, but here's one source: https://www.vizient.com/insights/reports/national-hospital-f...
There are many others as well.
FWIW, your experience doesn't seem contradictory to the operating margin claims.
Your experience seems to be that hospitals are run very inefficiently, implying that if they were run efficiently that their operating margins would be much higher than 2-5%. That may be the case, but that still means the Yale paper's claims don't make sense (unless they also propose some mechanism by which to suddenly force all hospitals to start operating efficiently).
But I'm also skeptical of your claim that hospitals are leaving a huge amount of operating margin on the table. IME, very little can be explained by "everyone is stupid." Would I be surprised if a given hospital was run very inefficiently or if a given hospital had a particular poor CIO or administrator? Not in the slightest. Would I be surprised if ALL hospitals were run by idiots who were leaving 10% operating margin on the table? Yes, I would be.
To be fair, my experience has been exclusively with hospitals running a specific EMR with a relatively new-ish (at the time) and difficult to configure billing system. Still, we were expecting to see shortfalls nearly an order of magnitude smaller than what we found.
That the hospitals didn't seem to notice the problem, and upon being told of it, often pushed back against moving to fix the problem, is what gave the impression that they must be running on much larger margins than advertised.