Executives don’t lose. They get paid when the company is doing poorly and they have to make “hard decisions” to do layoffs. They get paid when the company is doing well. The most downright destructive executives I’ve ever worked under are still employed. They don’t take pay cuts.<p>The workers, nurses, doctors, orderlies, etc at hospitals are completely burned out and are reduced to skeleton crews. Hospitals get bought by private equity or big conglomorates and are gutted and their owners rewarded handsomely for churning through people like sociopaths.<p>Why have hope?
<i>That is an average bonus of about $273,000, keeping pace with executive payouts that spiked in the four years before the pandemic hit</i><p>The headline makes it sound like executives were collecting enormous additional bonuses, yet this sentence basically says the bonuses were modest, and the same as previous, non-COVID years.
A fun thing happens if you ever look at international health insurance plans. Usually there are 2 plans. One covering the whole world and one covering the whole world minus the United States which costs literally half as much.<p>I’m not claiming executive bonuses are the reason US healthcare costs multiple times more than healthcare in any other country in the world, but the economics of the system are fundamentally broken in a way that is unique to the United States.
Isn’t this what we pay hospitals for though? I’m having trouble reconciling “massive hospitalization caused good hospital performance” with the expected outrage here.
It's a truism now that executives skim bonuses at all times. When the accountants got in charge of corporations they thought "Hey, we can write checks to ourselves!" and they did.<p>Not being a negative nelly. It's endemic. Any money left over from operation? It belongs to the executives. Can be dropping wages because "it wasn't a good year!" and executives still get bonuses.
It's firmly established that already rich people and a metric ton of money during the pandemic. I don't really see a reason why would hospital executives be excluded. The tide rises all (rich) boats.
There's a free market in the US, isn't it? Some would say, don't blame execs, they are products of the market, not the reason for it.<p>How many of HN readers would refuse some large bonus?