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Comment by listenallyall | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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