Remember Furloughing and Cutting Pay For Doctors During COVID 2021? Well, this CEO Got Paid $7.7 Million During That Year.
This is why doctors don’t trust administrators or trust the system.
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia delivered a record $7.7 million pay package to CEO Madeline Bell in 2021, as the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc in the health care industry, with deaths mounting and labor shortages putting nurses and other hospital staff under duress.
Here are some great tidbits about the above situation.
- Her pay was more than they gave out in charity care. “Her total pay amounted to more than the nonprofit hospital spent on free and discounted services to financially needy patients, or charity care, over the three previous years combined.”
- The hospital is nonprofit, of course.
The chairman of the board “called the CEO an “extraordinary leader” and said Bell’s compensation was “based on her excellent performance in leading CHOP to deliver on its very ambitious goals.”
This is just embarrassing to me. When doctors try to negotiate with their hospital employers it becomes adversarial but that’s not what happens with CEOs. I saw this with a company I created 20 years ago (long story) and I got bamboozled into letting others run. They immediately had the HR person look for comparisons of pay so they could get raises. The same thing happens for these hospital CEOs.
Nonprofit health systems commonly use consultants to set compensation by looking at what peer CEOs make, said Vikas Saini, president and CEO of the Lown Institute, a Massachusetts not-for-profit that advocates for equity and accountability in health care.
The consultants tell the nonprofit boards they need to keep their executive compensation competitive with their peer groups, Saini said. This results in many systems opting to pay more than average, ratcheting pay ever upward. “That’s the escalator we’ve been on,” Saini said.
Remember this story because it is all too common. Now, here is a quick test. Please put in the comments what you think the CEO of a hospital actually does. I’m waiting.
And will the physicians of Children’s Hospital say anything with a united voice about this?
Since most (usually >90%) of inpatient reimbursement comes from CMS (Medicare/Medicaid), I have long advocated that hospital CEOs be paid like the meeting attending government employees they are: cap them out at GS 15 pay which is about $153K yearly. They could even get the $400K salary of the US President and would be overpaid. The $7.7 mill figure is would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.
Corporate Greed at its most vile!!!
They discovered that “your money or your life” is a question bound up in human sentiments and can be used to squeeze people dry. We’re buying health care at the company store.
They boost the economy by putting all those millions to work building second and third homes and flying around on private jets?
“Please put in the comments what you think the CEO of a hospital actually does.”
They Lead, Doug, they Lead. Oh, God how they Lead.
I can just see them Leading. It’s breathtaking, the Leading.
They Lead here and they Lead there.
They Lead all day and they Lead all night.
God, Doug, the Leadership.
You can’t put a price on it.
lol
They hire consultants
When what the expensive consultant does something that worked, the CEO takes credit for their brilliant decisions and get bonuses.
When it fails they blame the consultant.
Better yet, the expensive consultant recommends what the physicians told them 3 years prior, for free.