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Hospital Uses Executive Bonus Money to Give its Workers A Raise

posted by martyb on Tuesday June 17 2014, @08:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the take-it-from-the-top dept.

gewg_ writes:

Parkland Health & Hospital System in Dallas[1] will raise its own minimum wage to $10.25 an hour next month...
The wage increase will cost the hospital about $350,000 a year. The expense will be covered with money from the upcoming quarter's bonus pool for the hospital's 60 vice presidents and top executives.

After this, every worker employed by Dallas County will make at least $10.25 an hour (still not a living wage by many measures).
Note also that this will barely put a dent in that pool, expected to be at least $3M for the year.

[1] People who have memories of November 22, 1963 will remember that as a historic location

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 17 2014, @01:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 17 2014, @01:49PM (#56361)

    In the 90s our congress made it so everyone had to get insurance thru their work. This covered about 70-80% of the population. This created a huge influx of money into the system.

    We went from hospitals being run by a few hundred people to a few thousand. The cost ratio was not in peoples minds anymore after a few years. I can get 'free health care for 50 bucks' (neither free but cheap to me but not my insurance company). With the decoupling of cost to service people no longer really cared about what the real cost was. The hospitals incorporated from community things that were supported usually by donations and taxes and fees; went to corporate for profit organizations. There have been huge massive mergers. For example where I grew up there were about 7 hospitals that provided different levels of care. Now there is 1 very large organization that runs them all and the cities around it. The hospital where I was born went from a building with maybe 100 rooms to a sprawling complex of I think the last number I heard was 2300 where they charge 1500+ just to be in a room for 1 night.

    The decoupling of cost vs service has made it very easy for these sprawling organizations to manipulate people into paying outrageous costs. You can in some cases pay 80 dollars for what is a disposable cotton swab. Something you could buy a lifetime supply for with 80 bucks. It is was when the insurance companies could no longer swing their investments (they saw the writing on the wall a year before the rest of us). It is why they pushed thru the ACA. They needed ever larger bases of people paying in to cover the ever growing costs. Their investments imploded and they went from a 95% payout rate to a 110%. As insurance companies are not a ponzi scheme but more like an investment bank with a large payout rate.

    We thought costs were high a couple of years ago? Just wait and see. On average an American pays 10x for the same out of care as people get in the rest of the world. Those VPs and junkets out to the cayman islands dont pay for themselves...