Hospital CEO Salaries: Are The Big Bucks Justified? - Page 4

I don't think you have any idea what my way of thinking is, and that's just silly hyperbole. You made a blanket statement about the formal education of the average executive, when in reality formal education comes after the inherent personal characteristics of successful people. That was especially true in the past when access to formal education was more limited. I think people in general tend to ascribe traits to people they don't know that fall in line with their general political outlook, especially when they encounter a lot of people with opposing viewpoints in a discussion such as this one. It's somewhat idealistic to believe an executive, because he or she is an executive, possesses the characteristics you described. Just as all executives are not evil Jeffrey Skilling types either, thank God.

You used one person as an example of how it must not be that difficult to run a successful multi-billion dollar company. What I posted was silly hyperbole?

I guess I could have corrected you by telling you that Steve Jobs founded Apple not Microsoft. That was Bill Gates.

CEO salaries are approved by the board of directors of the corporation, ipso facto justifying them. Questioning the legitimacy of plutocratic decisions is class warfare, pure and simple.

There are many components to the big picture.


Working dangerously short staffed creates life and limb threatening situations. When worse case scenarios occur, they can be disasterous for patients and their families. Let's just set the issue of needless human suffering aside. The financial cost to defend, litigate, and attempt to make these situations right is tremendous. These costs have to be met regardless of whether or not patients are paying their bills. In fact, if there are damages and a breach in the standard of care is evident, then the hospital is going to eat the cost of care any way.

My point is that no unit should be short staffed "due to the budget," if the budget provides for excessive and unreasonable compensation for the executives.

CEO is a widely used acronym in the corporate world that stands for 'chief executive officer.' The CEO of a hospital or healthcare system is the top executive in charge who bears the main responsibility for the organization's comprehensive operations and performance. In other words, the hospital CEO is the man or woman (typically a male) with the ultimate authority to make the big decisions regarding the manner in which the hospital will be run. The effects of the hospital CEO's decisions trickle down to all areas of the healthcare system in which he runs and can have lasting effects.

Healthcare expenditures in the United States have been escalating for quite some time. In this current era of rising healthcare costs, members of the public have been paying close attention to the compensation packages of hospital CEOs. The 2010 national average salary and bonus for a hospital CEO is $517,000 and $909,000 for a health system CEO, according to consulting firm Integrated Healthcare Strategies, reports Georgia Health News (Cheung, 2011).

Furthermore, many hospital CEOs earn salary packages that greatly exceed the national average. Nine percent of nonprofit hospital chief executives in the Midwest are paid more than $1 million a year, according to a new report (Glenn, 2011). Additionally, some hospital CEOs are paid multimillion dollar salaries each year. Javon Bea, president and CEO of Janesville, Wis.-based Mercy Health System, who made roughly $3.6 million in total compensation in 2009, is defending his salary, saying it has no effect on healthcare costs, according to a Janesville Gazette report (Herman, 2011).

Are these hefty salary ranges justifiable in this day and age? I'm assured that almost any highly paid hospital CEO would argue that certain talents and a specific skill set are required to successfully run health systems. Surely, nonprofit hospitals wish their executive salaries wouldn’t be held under such a public microscope, but that’s the price of a tax exemption — and it’s a price that to them apparently is ultimately worth it (Glenn, 2011).

Does it make any sense to have leaders of hospitals who earn salaries that are often many times more than the other employees' pay, especially when many healthcare facilities are going out of business? It's a difficult question to answer, and we cannot reasonably expect to use simple solutions to resolve complex problems. This is just some food for thought.