Impeding changes to our Health Care system

[SamIam]

Well, I did a quick and dirty Google search and here are 3 random results for Hospital CEO compensation:

In Atlanta:

...But the six- to seven-digit compensation packages for the chief executives who lead metro Atlanta’s taxpayer-subsidized hospitals remain untouched and in most cases are growing.
Five of these CEOs made more than $1 million in the fiscal year ending in 2009, the last tax records available.

In Baltimore:

Baltimore-area hospital CEOs and presidents boast seven-figure salaries, club and gym memberships, and paid financial planning and tax services as part of compensation packages from their nonprofit employers.

Nearly a dozen hospitals cover country club dues for top executives. Carroll Hospital, in reporting the compensation to the IRS, disclosed that it requires its chief executive officer to be a member of the exclusive local clubs "to facilitate hospital interaction with the community" and because of the "potential for donors."

At the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, top executives were given thousands of dollars to spend on health equipment, tuition and other personal expenditures.

And in California (Oxnard)

T. Michael Murray reaped $330,545 in 2008 as chief executive officer of St. John’s hospitals in Oxnard and Camarillo. He drew an additional $187,071 in bonuses with $73,113 more in benefits and other compensation.

His total package, according to IRS records, reached $590,729.
And he may have been underpaid, according to a statewide survey of 118 nonprofit hospitals. The report by the Payers & Providers healthcare business publication suggests the base salary for CEOs averaged $514,237.

Kick in bonuses, retirement money, reimbursement for education costs, expense accounts and the average total compensation hit $732,004.

[piercehawkeye45]

It will depend on the area of course but I know for a fact that some barely make the 250k limit. Though $1 million isn't that much compared to other CEOs.

[classicman]

the fact (is) that according to the Committee on Joint Taxation,
51 percent -- that is, a majority of American households -- paid no income tax in 2009. Zero. Zip. Nada. …
Actually, to show how out of whack things have gotten,
30 percent of American households actually made money from the tax system
by way of refundable tax credits -- the Earned Income Tax Credit, among others.
So 51 percent of American households paid no income tax in 2009,
but 30 percent actually made money under the current system."

Cornyn took care to refer to households that pay no "income tax," rather than suggesting that they paid no taxes at all. Many Americans who pay no income tax pay other federal taxes, most notably the payroll tax, which funds Social Security and Medicare and is deducted from every working American’s paycheck.

Some families who pay no federal income tax may be liable for state income taxes (and local property taxes, sales taxes and the like).

In addition, the richest 10 percent, 5 percent and 1 percent of taxpayers each paid significantly higher effective tax rates than Americans lower on the income spectrum.

There are enough different ways to look at the tax burden to allow all sides to pick and choose tax statistics that favor their positions.

Link

[TheMercenary]

Imagine that....

[classicman]

Pretty much like all these issues - hence very little gets done and inefficiency ...
fuggit.

[TheMercenary]

Wow, the God Damm President of the United States lied to the public and Bull Shitted us to get a bill passed....

Imagine that.

Is there a health insurance horror story disseminated by the White House and its allies that ever turned out to be true? Obamacare advocates have exercised more artistic license than a convention of Photoshoppers. Now, a prominent sob story shilled by President Obama himself about his own mother is in doubt. It’s high past time to call their bluffs.
The tall-tale-teller-in-chief cited mom Stanley Ann Dunham’s deathbed fight with her insurer several times over the years to support his successful push to ban pre-existing condition exclusions by insurers. In a typical recounting, Obama shared his personalized trauma during a 2008 debate: “For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.”
But there was something fundamentally wrong with Obama’s story. In a recently published biography of Obama’s mother, author and New York Times reporter Janny Scott discovered that Dunham’s health insurer had in fact reimbursed her medical expenses with nary an objection. The actual coverage dispute centered on a separate disability insurance policy.
Channeling document forger Dan Rather’s “fake, but accurate” defense, a White House spokesman insisted to the Times that the anecdote somehow still “speaks powerfully to the impact of pre-existing condition limits on insurance protection from health care costs” — even though Dunham’s primary health insurer did everything it was supposed to do and met all its contractual obligations.
No matter. Expanding government control over health care means never having to say you’re sorry for impugning private insurers. Democrats have dragged every available human shield into the contentious debate over Obama’s federal takeover of health care. Personal anecdotes of dying family members battling evil insurance execs deflect attention from the cost, constitutionality and liberty-curtailing consequences of the law. The president’s Dunham sham-ecdote is just the latest entry in an ever-expanding catalogue of Obamacare fables:

http://michellemalkin.com/2011/07/15...macare-fables/

[SamIam]

Yet another unbiased and accurate contribution from a blog dedicated to the dissemination of truth and the American Way. Cigna did not exactly "do everything it was supposed to do." I don't know why right wingers make so light of the importance of a separate disability insurance policy. Without an income from employment, it becomes a nightmare to pay the medical bills not covered by a medical insurance policy and/or just plain cover the bills to exist. Of course, such hair splitting on the part of Tea Party sympathizers should come as no surprise, since the TP'ers are avid to balance the budget at the expense of low income disabled and elderly. The kindest thing that one can say about the conservative insistence that all safety net programs for the most vulnerable members of our society be dismantled in the name of balancing the budget, is that the Tea Party is sadly lacking in members with the ability to perform arithmetic at the 5th grade level. As I have stated elsewhere, dismantling programs which assist the low income disabled and elderly to survive in the name of balancing the budget is akin to picking up 3 grains of sand on the beach and announcing that all the sand has been swept away. This hypocrisy that the right is so persistent indulging in has to be one of the most grievous policies proposed in the current budgetary/health care debate - that all entities, both governmental and private, should consign the elderly and the disabled to perdition.

I await the day when the Tea Party canonizes Adolf Hitler for making the disabled his first target for Germany's grand plan of world-wide eugenics. Long before the Jews were rounded up, long before the gypsies and the Poles and other undesirables were sent off to the camps, the disabled people of Germany and Austria were taken from hospitals and institutions and sent to the very first camps whose purpose was genocide. The Nazi's refined their techniques on the disabled long before the first Jew was subjected to the first whiff of poison gas. It's time people started calling a spade a spade. God knows, society will need quite a few of them if the Tea Party attitude toward the most desperate members of our society becomes the law of the land.

[DanaC]

Our government over here has brought in a load of changes to the benefits system, particularly affecting those with long term illness and disability and also particularly affecting housing benefit.

They've done this in the name of cutting costs. But a couple of weeks ago a leaked letter from one of their own advisors suggested that the cost involved in an upswing in homlessness and deep deprivation would make this 'saving' into a net loss.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by SamIam

Yet another unbiased and accurate contribution from a blog dedicated to the dissemination of truth and the American Way.

I am at the point where I, and a number of other voters, will vote for anyone who runs against Obama. That really is the most important task at hand, make sure Obama is a one term president. How much longer do you think the Demoncrats can repeat verbatim the talking bullshit lines about millionaires and billionaires and owners of airplane companies, it is becoming laughable.

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

I am at the point where I, and a number of other voters, will vote for anyone who runs against Obama.

You say that as if you were ever not at that point.

[SamIam]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

I am at the point where I, and a number of other voters, will vote for anyone who runs against Obama. That really is the most important task at hand, make sure Obama is a one term president. How much longer do you think the Demoncrats can repeat verbatim the talking bullshit lines about millionaires and billionaires and owners of airplane companies, it is becoming laughable.

Really? You'd vote for Palin or Michele Bachmann or some other one of those Pee Bag clowns?

It doesn't really matter, I guess. I visualize the lot of them all running as Independents and hopelessly splintering the Conservative ticket.

I'm disappointed in Obama, myself, and I don't see anyone even on the distant horizon that I'd want to vote for. Well, I take that back. I may write in Charlie Sheen. "Winning..." At least he's got a bizarre attitude that fits in with the times, and I bet he'd legalize drugs which would balance the budget right there. No more zillions poured into a lost cause which we'll never win. Plus, the gov could tax all that crap and rake in a nice profit.

Can you imagine Charlie giving a State of the Union Address or meeting with foreign dignatories like Queen Elizabeth? What a hoot!

Yeah, the more I think about it, Charlie is dah man! Palin is too predictable and Bachmann needs to get back on her meds sooner rather than later. yourself

[infinite monkey]

I think Obama is the king shit and I will VOTE VOTE VOTE for him again. I never expected a savior. I expected a human being who will try to get some things done, and stay strong against adversity (by adversity, I mean pasty old crybaby republicans.)

There. I said it. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

And I expect that he'll get re-elected, btw.

[henry quirk]

Seriously?

As I said sometime back: He's a mediocre man of mediocre intellect with mediocre ideas (pretty much like every one else in the political sphere).


"I expect that he'll get re-elected"

Probably ('left', 'right', 'middle': all the same to me).

[infinite monkey]

Seriously.

You think he's mediocre? OK, fine. Was Bush also mediocre? No...bush was evil incarnate.

I don't see any viable candidates, I see a bunch of half-crazed megalomaniacs. If you know of any decent viable candidates feel free to post them here.

*tapping toes*

[henry quirk]

Yep...and Clinton and Reagan and any one (on any level of government) else you care to name.

Politics is the game of the schmooze and finagle...this requires 'cleverness' and 'charisma', not intelligence or insight.

Politicians (of any stripe, on any level) are nuthin' but used car salesmen (and women).


"If you know of any decent viable candidates feel free to post them here."

To me, there are only two 'viable' choices for 'governor' (one who 'governs'): nemo and mu.