I wonder how important private charity is anyway. The US leads the world in private charity, yet we're worse off than countries with less charity and more robust public institutions, such as the safety net, health care, and so forth.
There’s not a direct causal link between the metrics you’re describing. The economy is too large for private philanthropy to meaningfully impact things like health care delivery costs but it can still be crucial for the arts, community programs, and science funding and all sorts of other unconnected things.
That doesn’t tell you how important it is, because certainly nobody is currently planning to replace private charity spending with public institutions.
