Abstract
This study aimed to analyze the debt of hospitals that provide highly complex health services to the Brazilian National Health System (SUS), highlighting the nature of these organizations: public, university and philanthropic. For this purpose, based on Avelar et al. (2015) and La Forgia and Couttolenc (2009), six econometric models were proposed, with hospital debt as dependent variable, and financial and operational indexes and categorical variables as independent variables. The secondary data collected refer to the years of 2015, 2016 and 2017 for samples from 45, 54 and 49 hospitals, per year, service providers to SUS. Based on the determinants identified in this study, the public hospitals debt may be related to the higher rates of worked hours per bed (FTELO), on average, and higher occupancy rates (TO), on average. The university hospitals had lower levels of debt, since they presented, on average, greater risk (R) and profitability (ROA).