HOSPITAL CEO COMPENSATION

If you want to advise someone on what might be a rewarding career, you might mention being a CEO of a hospital complex.  Kaiser Health News has published a number of these positions for 32 hospital complexes.*  The "poorest" paid on their list received "only" $615,000 in total compensation for 2011 at the Grady Health System in Georgia, and this figure may not include benefits.  Ten other CEOs received less than a million dollars.

The best paid is Kaiser Permanenty in California at $7,936,510.  He didn't even have to a physician, and I counted 16 others at the hospital complex earning over a million dollars in a year.  Number two on the CEO list is the Providence Health and Services in Washington at $6,379,455  with 19 others earning more than a million dollars a year, including one over $4 million and 3 over $3 million.  Number three on the list  was UPMC Pittsburgh whose CEO earned $5,975,462 (again not a physician) but with 19 others earning over a million dollars a year.  There are three people listed that seemed to have earned two salaries in 2011, one of which is brought up over a million dollars in combined compensation and another was over a million dollars to begin with.  So you can do pretty well, even if you are not a physician or a CEO.  Some places declined to to disclose CEO compensation such as Univ. Colorado Health and University of Alabama, Biringham.

I live in North Carolina so how did the Carolinas HealthCare system line up?  Not bad, Mr. Michael Tarwater earned $4,760,026 in 2011.

Is it no wonder that that medical bills are so high?

Of the most famous  hospital complexes, the Cleveland (OH) Clinic's Dr. Delos Cosgrove earned $2,564,214 without a bonus offered, and the Mayo (MN) Clinic's Dr. John Noseworthy got $2,002,896, also without a bonus offered.

* http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2013/June/06/hospital-ceo-compensation-chart.aspx?wpisrc=nl_wonk_b