The headline in the New Haven Register’s Sunday edition, “Bad Medicine: Hospitals: funding cuts, proposed tax increases may hurt patient care,” is way off the mark.
One place hospitals can cut back without affecting patient care is to reduce the number of administrators and scale back their exorbitant salaries. As “Bitter Pill,” a March 4 article in Time magazine reported, the CEO of Yale-New Haven Hospital earns $2.5 million annually, almost a million dollars more than Yale President Richard Levin and more than six times what the president of the United States earns.
I suspected the administration of Yale-New Haven was bloated when I read that at a recent ribbon-cutting ceremony of the Yale-affiliated North Haven Medical Center, Yale-New Haven’s CEO was accompanied by the chief operating officer, three vice presidents and three hospital department chiefs. A cursory perusal of Yale-New Haven’s website reveals that the hospital system employs nine senior vice presidents and 14 vice presidents.
Hospital executive salaries are only one cause of the explosion in health care costs. And while Obamacare will expand coverage under Medicaid and private insurance, a laudable goal, it will do very little to contain health care costs. Exorbitant hospital bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States.
Now Paul Ryan and other Republicans are advocating raising the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67, a move that would put millions of additional elderly individuals at risk for financial ruin due to out-of-control medical bills. In recent years the Medicare program has been successful in negotiating reasonable charges for what it pays hospitals. Let’s expand the Medicare program to cover all Americans and begin to put a lid on runaway hospital costs.
Carol Merriman
North Haven