Honestly CEO pay is rarely that big of an issue when stretched out across all their employees.
The real problem is for-profit enterprises should have nothing to do with medical care.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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I see this has a lot of back and forth, but you're right. While ceo wages are high, the largest issue with wealth inequality goes beyond just wages (usually stock/ownership, etc.)
If you look, many CEOs don't get most of their wealth from salary. It's the same reason Trump was "willing" to take a $1 salary for president, the grift is happening elsewhere.
Exactly the grift/graft isn't their pay necessarily.
What do you mean stretched out across all employees?
Lcmc is a "nonprofit" for tax related purposes and the CEO's salary is $2.2M!
The two main hospital chains are oschner and LCMC.
As of a few years ago I remembered the oschner CEO salary being way smaller than lcmc's CEO.
I just double checked and it looks like they had a leadership change 2 years ago and now oschner's CEO makes even more than lcmc's at $3.2M!
https://nonprofitlight.com/la/new-orleans/ochsner-health-system
Not only that, within oschner there are different CEOs across different campuses
https://news.ochsner.org/news-releases/david-callecod-named-ceo-of-ochsner-lsu-health
This is fucking insanity! It's very much a problem. People talking about Medicaid Cuts and more efficiency, but yeah let's have multiple CEOs for the same hospital within the same city.
The Louisiana department of health is blaming Medicaid being too expensive and unsustainable on patients being less healthy over recent years and requiring too much healthcare and doctors not wanting to take Medicaid patients because they get paid less.
Yet LCMC just got rid of several doctors who took Medicaid! Not a whole lot of logic there.
Is it really that people got less healthy over the last two years and required more care? Or is it that oschner changed leadership and tried to go for the corrupt model lcmc was already using and now it's breaking the system.
Hospital expenses are mainly going into the pockets of CEOs that shouldn't exist and this is being blamed on the doctors and patients.
We gotta make cuts, where do we start.
Hmm... Healthcare needs it's CEOs that's a given. No need to keep all those unnecessary doctors and patients around though
Ok Ochner has 32000 employees so 3,200,00/32000 =1000 tat’s a $0.50 per hour raise for every full time worker if the CEO wasn’t paid.
That’s what I mean. At larger scales it becomes even less money. By the time you get to huge employers like 7-11 it’s a few extra bucks a year.
I'm not saying we should be rasing pay for other employees at all. I'm saying the reason Medicaid is becoming unsustainable is because we have so many CEOs making insanely huge salaries like this.
The point of healthcare is to provide care to patients. Not to create hospital monopolies.
If Medicare is unsustainable that means healthcare cuts.
When you're looking for where you should be making healthcare cuts what makes the most logical sense to you?
At least having a discussion about how these administrative salaries and positions are actually justified?
Or
•Slash and burn policy eliminating doctors that were already accepting Medicaid
•Reducing care offered to patients so that the patients will then indeed become less healthy, rely on emergency services and require more costly care in the long run
•Claiming Medicaid is unsustainable bc "no doctors want to accept Medicaid patients."
If you abruptly eliminate all the doctors that do accept Medicaid and then claim you need to increase the Medicaid budget to incentivise doctors in order to get them to accept Medicaid patients, then yes, by default it becomes easy to make the argument that no doctors in your hospital "want to accept Medicaid."
Medicaid is unsustainable because we do not permit them to negotiate pricing..The entirety of for profit medicine should be ended
So maybe we need some legislative action to push for caps on CEO salaries and number of CEO/administrative positions per hospital to receive any federal or state funding.
Why tf does one giant monopoly of hospitals need a CEO for each campus?!
Because you need one singular person signing off on decisions
The whole point of having a giant monopoly is that all hospitals are under the same control with the same policy and regulations.
This is not normal.
Yes, it is. The CEO is the top executive at that company. In a conglomerate the CEOs are still answering to the parent company and/ir board of directors.
Then what is the point of having a monopoly control everything in the first place? If every campus needs its own CEO to be making decisions what exactly is the benefit of having LCMC or Oschner controlling all of these hospitals?
It seems like you could be providing better healthcare with less bureaucracy if you just let individual hospitals take care of patients. Especially since most of these hospitals already existed before these companies came in and saved the day by purchasing all of these hospitals.
Then what is the point of having a monopoly control everything in the first place?
Larger corporations can negotiate for better pricing and the economies of scale can make bigger more effective.
If every campus needs its own CEO to be making decisions what exactly is the benefit of having LCMC or Oschner controlling all of these hospitals?
Not every single decision needs to be made by the board or top executive. Sometimes you need a person to lead on site and be the top dog there but who actually answers to others.
It seems like you could be providing better healthcare with less bureaucracy if you just let individual hospitals take care of patients.
Not really? You still need people running it. What would help is removing the for profit elements of medicine.
Especially since most of these hospitals already existed before these companies came in and saved the day by purchasing all of these hospitals.
They could buy these hospitals vecause they couldn’t be managed effectively. To me that suggests medicine should be a service that isn’t profit driven and not a business.
Great, I'm actually trying to find a new primary care doctor right now.
Tried to call my old office to see if they could help me and it rang and rang until it eventually hung up on me.
Just tried to contact one the main number to make an appointment and got a voicemail telling me to leave briefly message.
Tried to call a third number the nurses help hotline provided me and it rang once and hung up.
I'll probably just end up going to CVS again and using their minute clinic, which actually seems to have a better handle on healthcare at this point than the giant corporation that has purchased every hospital in the area.
But I'm glad we have CEOs at every campus making sure everything runs so smoothly even though there are no doctors available to provide healthcare.
The CEO is there to make sure the hospital functions not that it provides care.
How is a hospital "functioning" if there's nobody there to provide care? That's kind of the whole point of hospitals.
Functioning in this case means the lights are on, the supplies are replenished, that the hospital has what it needs. The CEO’s job is not to ensure care is provided. That’s a doctor’s job
In this case the hospital cannot afford to pay both the salary of CEOs and doctors that provide care.
So cuts have to be made somewhere. You're suggesting the rational thing to do in this case would be to cut the doctors and keep the CEOs so that they can keep lights on in an empty building. That's so crazy it just might work. Problem solved.
I have said nothing of the sort. Don't put words in my mouth.