Important information sent by one of my senior colleagues made sense. Even in India in so-called trust not for profit hospitals, the main take away is by the top two or three non-medical executives and the marketing team distributing payoffs.

Can’t doctors run hospitals? They have been running all these years. Why do we need marketing departments in established hospitals? Patients will come of their own.  Why branded hospitals do needs to market themselves?

Affordable care can become more affordable if the cost of marketing and managing the hospitals can be passed on to the patients.

The rising cost of healthcare in India is a concern. Even in US families who are working hard to get ahead now pay nearly $20,000 per year in insurance premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs for healthcare. But these so-called “non-profit” hospitals and their CEOs are getting richer while the people are getting healthcare poorer.

A new report Investigating the Top 82 U.S. Non-Profit Hospitals, Quantifying Government Payments and Financial Assets specifically looked at large non-profits organized as charities under IRS Section 501(c)3 with the mission of delivering affordable healthcare to their communities. They found that these hospitals add billions of dollars annually to their bottom line, lavishly compensate their CEOs, and spend millions of dollars, which are generated by patient fees, lobbying government to defend the status quo.

The executive compensation showed that 13 organizations paid their top earner between $5 million and $21.6 million; 61 organizations paid their top executive between $1 million and $5 million and only 8 organizations paid their top earner less than $1 million (which proves it’s possible).

Collectively, $297.5 million in cash compensation flowed to the top paid executive at each of the 82 hospitals.  They found payouts as high as $10 million, $18 million and even $21.6 million per CEO or another top-paid employee.

Banner Health paid out $34 million to just two executives. The president of Banner made $21.6 million and an executive vice-president made $12.4 million.

Consider Former CEO at Memorial Hermann in Houston, Texas made $18.6 million. In St. Louis, Missouri, the chief at Ascension Health made $13.6 million; the CEO at the Kaiser Foundation in Oakland, California made $10.7 million; and $10.6 million went to the top paid executive of Northwestern Memorial HealthCare in Chicago, Illinois.

When summing the last four years of pay (2013-2017), each of these highly compensated executives – who made more than $10 million in 2017 alone –  earned an extraordinary amount of compensation: Ascension CEO ($59.1 million); Kaiser CEO ($29.8 million); Banner CEO ($29.6 million); Advocate Health CEO, based in Downers Grove, Illinois ($27.8 million); Memorial Hermann Special Advisor/CEO ($27.3 million); and Northwestern Memorial COO ($15.3 million). Even after paying lavish salaries, these non-profit hospitals had enough left over to add nearly $40 billion to their bottom-line.