Many people have experienced the exorbitant cost of healthcare, where an overnight stay for care can run upwards of the thousand dollar range and aspirins cost as much as a high-priced New York cocktail. Non-profit hospitals are run like Fortune 500 companies, where the insurance industry dictates coverage and profits can take priority over patient care. Should healthcare in any form be a profit center? That is the crux of the healthcare cost quandary.
A recent NYTimes story explored how city hospitals seek judgements against patients caught in high-cost medical binds.
In their continuing coverage of the Business of Medicine, Lohud writers Cathey O’Donnel and Jane Lerner explore executive pay at Lower Hudon Valley hospitals and reveal some eye-popping statistics — hospital administrators at non-profit hospitals regularly earn million dollar salaries. Dr. Edward Lundy at Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern earned $1.48 million in salary and compensation in 2010. These high salaries come as area hospitals continue pressure for wage freezes and staff cuts while continuing to build out with new construction projects.
Good Samaritan paid a total of more than $2 million to four top administrators in 2009, including a CEO who had resigned the previous year and one who served for just a month during a tumultuous year in which the hospital lost $4.9 million.
Eight executives from 15 Lower Hudson Valley hospitals received more than $1 million in salary, bonuses, benefits and other pay in 2010 at a time when the state struggled to control health-care costs.
A Journal News analysis of tax records shows they included CEOs and top physicians who earned five times more than a cap ordered last month by Gov. Andrew Cuomo for nonprofit organizations, a move to restrict the amount of state money they can use on executive compensation to $199,000 a year.
Million-dollar salaries have raised the ire of Cuomo, who also ordered that 85 percent of state hospital funding, including Medicaid, must go toward patient care and services by 2015.
