In what is likely the largest nurses strike in American history, 15,000 Minnesota nurses today went on strike for better pay and benefits after working short-staffed through the pandemic. Hospital CEOs insist they can’t afford the increases: “They left with wage demands at 29 percent to 30 percent, which we’ve told them repeatedly is unreasonable and is unaffordable,” their chief negotiator told Minnesota local news.
But the five CEOs of the largest hospitals now pleading poverty have raked in a payout of more than $25 million over the three most recently available tax years. In just the last year alone, they paid themselves the following:
- David Herman, CEO of Essentia Health: $2,697,603
- James Hereford, CEO of M Health Fairview: $2,621,429
- Andrea Walsh, CEO of HealthPartners: $2,444,428
- Marc Gorelick, CEO of Children’s Minnesota: $1,459,584
- J. Kevin Croston, CEO of North Memorial: $1,274,710
Meanwhile, nurses in Minneapolis average just $86,690 per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The hospitals are also spending millions of dollars on extremely costly strike-replacement nurses.
It seems like for hospital CEOs, “unaffordable” is just a code word for “fair compensation.”
Healthcare is being contracted out at every level. This relieves hospital administrators of the responsibility for speed ups, reduction of benefits and wages. Doctors are now contracted as groups. The contracts can be cancelled when the hospital administrators and financial analytic managers locate a contracting company that offers a more competitive price. It’s a bidding war to the bottom. The latest innovation is contracting for productivity management. The simplest way to understand the meaning of “productivity” is speed up. That is how many patients and billables did you generate in a day? It’s a treadmill of accelerating speed monitored by managers who are essentially extensions of an algorithm. They are people who know nothing of the real lives of healthcare workers or the complexity of patient care. They want to squeeze more out of fewer personnel. That’s all they know: how many widgets did you make—daily, weekly, monthly. But let’s be clear, the salaries of hospital administrator is a mirage of the real driver in healthcare costs and the decline of quality care. The real driver of this is declining insurance reimbursements and the corporate take-over of healthcare. The administrators depend on hospitals staying afloat in an ever more perilous insurance environment. This is how they can justify their high salaries. In comparison to the salaries of insurance executives, their salaries are mere chump change.