As COVID raged in New York hospitals, executives pocketed $73M in bonuses (2022) | Hacker News Reader

As COVID raged in New York hospitals, executives pocketed $73M in bonuses (2022)

lohud.com

110 pointsVagueMag66 comments

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.

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.

Why have hope?

>Why have hope?

I feel this sentence is a non sequitur unless you inject "and this will never be fixed because A, B, C" before it.

I have hope that it will resolve, but I don't have hope that it will be done in what I consider an appropriate timeframe.

I think 'we' are talking about these (relatively tiny, but still extremely terrible and important to fix) injustices more than 'we' did while the East India Company were operating.

There's no guarantee of resolution, we can just as easily go even deeper into a capitalist-feudal state. The truth is we have enough resources to solve all these problems, and mitigate all this suffering and yet we don't, and the problems are getting worse not better. Maybe it'll be better in a generation, but we've squandered and centralized so much wealth without actually building much of anything useful. Our towns and cities crumble.

> I think 'we' are talking about these (relatively tiny, but still extremely terrible and important to fix) injustices more than 'we' did while the East India Company were operating.

I'm sure Indians would beg to differ!

That is an average bonus of about $273,000, keeping pace with executive payouts that spiked in the four years before the pandemic hit

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.

The way I read the article -- the main point is that the bonuses doled out to executives stood in stark contrast with the sacrifices of, you know, the actual front-line workers out in the truth. Who in some cases made the ultimate sacrifice, in fact.

And for funding those bonuses (in part) with "emergency" relief funds provided by the federal government.

You’d think if the healthcare system is overrun, the executives have to work harder as well.

This is just the standard ‘executives get bonuses’ whine with some COVID sauce on top of it.

The executives have to work harder as well.

Nowhere near as much as the front-line workers, by all accounts.

The whole idea of ‘front-line workers’ as if it’s some kind of battlefield is stupid drama and leads to nothing but Facebook whinery about unrelated things like executive bonuses. It’s so excessively dramatic it can’t be taken seriously.

If they want executive pay, take a management course and move upwards through the organization. It really isn’t that hard.

Is stupid drama and leads to nothing but Facebook whinery

Right -- the workers quoted in the article (the same people who will be saving your ass on your next trip to the emergency room) are just a bunch of whining babies, with no idea they're talking about. Too stupid, in fact, to realize that literally each and everyone one of them can just take a class, and help themselves to CEO pay.

No, they aren’t the ones complaining about executive bonuses and in fact nowhere does the article say they are the ones complaining. They leave that useless whinery to Karen on the internet.

> the same people who will be saving your ass on your next trip to the emergency room

This kind of emotional appeal is on the same level as crying ‘Won’t somebody please think about the children!’. And of course it has absolutely nothing to do with executive bonuses.

They aren’t the ones complaining about executive bonuses

From the article: "Frontline nurse talks about NY hospital executive pay and bonuses during pandemic"

Apparently the tear tugging emotional appeal of this nurse is so inconsequential it wasn’t deemed worthy including in the article text, but indeed they found a nurse issuing it. She felt this, she felt that. I don’t think a hospital is the right place of work if you can’t stand the risks of being close to sick people and I doubt there would be any amount of money that would have ameliorated the risk. But hey, you can and should always try for more! Shame the executives are more effective at that and I do agree that a management course is not for everyone, case in point.

Why do you believe the executives should be paid more in these situations? They take less personal health risk than the front-line workers and by your logic it seems that executive jobs aren't that difficult if the job can be acquired by just taking a management course. So they clearly aren't being paid more because the job is harder.

You have the right to read the article with whatever degree of disgust you want. I'd ask, if the execs were enriching themselves by siphoning off the emergency relief funds, why was the bonus amount the same as the previous 4 years? Shouldn't it be higher?

At the very least - there should be some explicit accounting of where the money went. And some provision for ensuring that front-line workers are adequately protected and compensated.

Seems that detailed accounting records do exist and are publicly accessible. That's how USA Today was able to conduct an analysis, and subsequently write this article.

The only records they referred to were in regard to outputs (end-of-year profits, compensation for upper-tier employees).

Not in regard to how federal moneys were spent.

That's what USA Today reported on. Maybe you should check the source data set yourself before complaining that there's no accounting?

Maybe you should check the source data set yourself

You understand that your simply closing your eyes and imagining that this data set must exist (and in the level of detail that you want it to have) doesn't make it so, right?

Bear in mind, that $273000 could fund 5-6 nurses.

No, it couldn't, salaries are higher and fully-loaded costs significantly higher. Further, there is a massive nurse shortage, the idea there are nurses out there waiting to be hired is absolutely not true.

Maybe where you live, first year nurses here would gladly take 50K just to start paying off their university costs.

Edit: if the hospitals won't hire them directly, they can also go to a contract nursing agency and start working in eg. home care (which oddly enough pays more than working at a hospital)

That $50K/yr salary nurse is probably costing the hospital $75K/yr or more all-in. (That's what GP meant when they said "fully loaded".)

For context, New York Presbyterian employs over 20,000 people including 6,500 doctors.

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.

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.

People are mad that in a crisis an amount large money was given to executives who are already very well compensated and also not on the front lines, rather than to the frontline workers.

In fact, hospital staffing levels fell after the initial outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 and had not fully recovered two years later. Meanwhile, it was considered everyone's personal obligation to undertake every possible manner of precaution to avoid infection so as to protect the putatively "overloaded" hospital systems.

Even in my EU country, with a decent public healthcare system, the staffing shortages have increased post-covid and are only getting worse.

The irony is that the staff shortages are further amplifying the shortages, as stressed out staff is leaving the field and youngsters want to avoid this profession when they hear about the stress of dealing with the shortages.

It's like the rolling snowball effect.

The obvious solution is to pay staff much more, but with what money? We can't print anymore cheap money as we're already in an inflationary environment and we can't raise taxes any further as people already pay enough taxes and we've already committed more money to the military after the Russian invasion. Politicians are in a pickle.

>but with what money?

"As COVID raged in New York hospitals, executives pocketed $73M in bonuses"

Found the money.

EU hospital bosses don't get those insane payouts.

European Hospitals still work with-in a capitalist market. I am a little jealous that you guys try to do things over there: https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/eu-bars-baile...

A crisis is exactly when you need good executive management though isn't it?

I don't see any evidence that was actually in supply though. The executive leadership seems to have done nothing to interrupt the rampant overuse of ventilators or remdesivir, both of which were actively harmful to Covid patients. They also all lined up behind the vaccine mandates which had absolutely zero benefit in reducing transmission and aggravated the staffing problems. They're far more deserving of pink slips than bonuses.

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.

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 is kind of incredible just how many people and companies made so much money off of COVID.

Never let a crisis go to waste...

“I went to work at a New York hospital during the peak COVID wave and all I got was a lousy pots and pans parade”

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.

You mean someone stood to gain with all those "covid" deaths? Color me surprised.

I would be more surprised if that didn’t happen

I mean, isn't that entirely expected? If more care is needed, hospital revenues and profits increase, so executive gets bonuses?

To have read the article and responded with such a simplistic assessment leaves me puzzled.

If by "simplistic" you mean "how things work and how people expect them to work", then yeah, "simplistic" I guess.

Simplistic in the sense that the health economy is much more complex than your Econ 101 take.

Is it? How so?

Reading the fine article would give you a starting point to answer that

I did read it, but didn't see anything on how "healthcare doesn't follow the rules of a normal business".

Can you elaborate on what you meant?

It's still sad to see this level of exploitation while the pictures of corpses in trucks is still in memory.

Of course, we still remember the governor of New York claiming that PPE was walked in the front door of hospitals and walked out the back door of hospitals by employees ripping it off...

When staffing and equipment levels take a huge hit, give large amounts of money to a small number of people rather than invest it in solving the major problems it's facing? That is profoundly stupid. So is running a hospital like a business.

Clearly those problems didn't impact hospital revenues, which increased dramatically leading to increased bonuses.

And hospital who didn't pay out those bonuses had those problems as well.

Did you read the article? Those problems didn't impact hospital revenues because they were handed billions in emergency funding from the government.

Right, but they also used those revenues to treat Covid patients?

and then skimmed a large bucket for themselves.

It's simple greed and profiteering. That's where the outrage comes from. And it was government (your) money.

How is it greed? The hospital did more services and received more income, thus the executives got bigger bonuses.

I'm not sure it matters if the income was from the government, since 50%+ of all healthcare is paid by the government in normal times.

At the very least, we shouldn't have been hearing one word about how the hospital system was supposedly stretched to its limits (which was the whole justification for extending "15 days to slow the spread" into "lockdown until we have a vaccine") while there was still money and resources to pay these bonuses.

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.

How many of HN readers would refuse some large bonus?

Yeah - I never understand this train of thought. It seems like some edgy teen ranting while working as cashier at the movies. It's a company - they can pay whoever they want, however much they want, and they are not obligated to keep anyone employed or have their internal compensation dictated by society.

What society can do is organize into unions and push back, so when they lay off nurses while taking bonuses, the remaining nurses go too and the business goes out of business. If that's the consequence of laying people off, instead of remaining people being unhappy being underpaid for 20 hour shifts, then the company will either use the bonus money for employees, or close down.

True. If you don’t like it, go to Russia. (/s)

Why don't the users simply select health care system outside the one that pays too much in their mind to executives? Surely in a free market society there must be alternatives, or maybe some VC firm should start one ignoring all the regulations like they did with Uber and AirBnB that everyone loves.

They do. People forgo healthcare, use online searches and forums, visit cheaper non medical doctors, travel to other countries, etc.

Emergencies do not really have an alternative though, for obvious reasons.

There are no government subsidies and bailouts in a free market, what you see in the US today is exactly the opposite of it: crony mixed economy with overreaching government control.

> There's a free market in the US, isn't it?

No, there is not.

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