Nonprofit hospitals have made much ado about the costs of charity care provided to the poor. So when President Obama’s 2010 health law went into effect, offering states an opportunity to expand Medicaid and bring in billions of dollars in federal welfare spending, these hospitals jumped at the opportunity. They argued that adding working-age people without children or disabilities to the Medicaid rolls could curb their charity care and bad debt expenses and put them on better financial footing.

Is there reason to doubt these hospitals’ claims that Medicaid expansion is in the best interest of health care costs? Watchdog reporter Jason Hart has spent the past year and a half covering the true costs of Medicaid expansion in the states under Obamacare, and his reports on the issue show that these hospitals’ concerns are overblown. Here’s what his investigations have uncovered:

In 2013, the year when Ohio was considering expanding Medicaid, nonprofit hospitals profited to the tune of $2.8 billion. Some of the larger institutions posted nonprofit profits of hundreds of millions of dollars. Charity care costs represented just 2.4 percent of their expenses – meaning that most nonprofit hospitals would have ended up in the black with millions of dollars to spare even if they had no funding for their charity care. Despite the manageable costs, however, they still lobbied for Medicaid expansion.