Ron Shinkman, editor of the trade newsletter Payers & Providers, spent four months reviewing tax documents filed by 120 nonprofit California hospitals in 2007 and 2008. He found that base CEO compensation was somewhere around $517,123 in that period, which is more than double national numbers from a survey published in 2001.
To add perspective to the numbers, California Watch’s Christina Jewett looked at Shinkman’s research – especially the sentence that mentioned “11 hospital executives whose compensation exceeded the cost of the charity care provided by their hospitals during the reporting year” – and evaluated it in terms of the national debate over the amount of charity care provided by nonprofit hospitals.
Shinkman is charging for full copies of his work and the resulting white paper, but between Jewett’s coverage and the brief version Shinkman has posted, readers should be able to get a pretty good idea of where the story is going and, perhaps more importantly, how to report on CEO pay at your local nonprofit hospitals.
For more help covering nonprofit hospitals:
- Changes to 990 forms make hospital finance investigations necessary
- Tools for covering hospitals: Financial documents
- Digging Into Hospital Finances: Recent trends and five key documents
- Reporting on the business of health care
- Health Journalism 2008: Ripping the cover off hospital finances
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