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Nonprofit hospitals skimp on charity while CEOs reap millions, report finds

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Re: Nonprofit hospitals skimp on charity while CEOs reap millions, report finds

#141

Post by carlosjobim »

bombcar wrote: post #133
carlosjobim wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can non-profits not reinvest income just as any other business?

They can - what (at least some) cannot do is stockpile cash at more than a certain amount (which I don't know what it is, but something like 1x yearly run-rate or something). So buying equipment or spending it on marketing, OK. Saving millions in the bank or investing - not OK.

Thanks for the explanation! So that means they can reinvest and grow their business just as much as for-profit businesses, then? If a for-profit saves millions in the banks, that will be taxed, as it is a profit at that stage.

Re: Nonprofit hospitals skimp on charity while CEOs reap millions, report finds

#142

Post by _jal »

csharpminor wrote: post #115
_jal wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an ongoing scam that pushes C-suite pay ever higher, and it needs to stop. It builds on exactly the reasoning you lay out, and goes something like this: - "We need the best CEO we can find. We have to understand how to set compensation to attract them." - So the board hires an executive compensation consultant. - "If you want better than average, you have to pay above average." So they target something like…

Did you not see my point about taxation?

I did. That's ridiculous. A classic example of attempting to divert blame while saying, "don't like it? Make me stop."

But perhaps I'm wrong; if a similar confluence of policy and supply conspired to enable a similar scam that pushed programmer compensation ever upwards, would you say that the proper solution to that problem would also be tax policy?

Re: Nonprofit hospitals skimp on charity while CEOs reap millions, report finds

#143

Post by Escapado »

conradev wrote: post #93
Escapado wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t adjust salary for what proportions people manage or are responsible for in a lot of other fields, at least not to the same extend. And especially if we would go by responsibility. I earn about 3 times as much as the average school teacher in my home town and about 4 times as much as the people driving the buses there while I sit in front of my screen and fix irrelevant css bugs or spin up the next semi-usefu…

I think it is a misunderstanding that the job market is optimizing for fairness: it is not. Executive pay is supply and demand. The mayor is being paid $450k because a person with the necessary skills was willing to take that salary (after fighting off opponents) to become mayor. Mayor comes with prestige, so more people want to be mayor, and $450k is not a terrible incentive to go after. If the government paid $80k…

I should have been more clear on what I mean: I am well aware that the job market is not optimizing for fairness but that is what people often judge situations on.

I do understand how it came to all of this and how the situation is justified but just posed that if we turned our back to completely free markets and imagined a structure based on "fairness" then things should probably be different.

Furthermore I disagree with the argument that nobody would want to work an intense job while being "underpaid". Plenty of labor is really intense and pays minimum wage or barely over.

Re: Nonprofit hospitals skimp on charity while CEOs reap millions, report finds

#144

Post by W00kasz »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #5

Hospitals are all non-profit so they can reap tax benefits. In order to avoid profit but still maintain growth, they shovel all their profits into network expansion. New hospitals, clinics, outpatient centers, wellness centers, all that in order to avoid lowering costs for patients. This is why it seems each locale is packed with care all from one central hospital. They have to keep growing to maintain "non-profit" s…

[dead]

Re: Nonprofit hospitals skimp on charity while CEOs reap millions, report finds

#145

Post by Jensson »

RHSeeger wrote: post #118
gniv wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are right to be suspicious. For example, back when I lived in the US and went for a checkup at a big hospital in NY: first there were greeters at the entrance of the building, then a greeter on the right floor, then a small army of receptionists, then a nurse, then a PA, then the doctor. All these are expenses. Are they necessary? Here in France there is, maybe, a receptionist that sends me to the office…

> Here in France there is, maybe, a receptionist that sends me to the office where the doctor does everything, including billing. If the doctor is making an order of magnitude more for their time than the receptionist, it's far more effective to have more receptionists for the work either of them could do.

The trick is to pay doctors less, a country can easily lower doctor salaries by educating more doctors, there is no lack of people who want to be doctors.

Re: Nonprofit hospitals skimp on charity while CEOs reap millions, report finds

#146

Post by RHSeeger »

Jensson wrote: post #145
RHSeeger wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here in France there is, maybe, a receptionist that sends me to the office where the doctor does everything, including billing. If the doctor is making an order of magnitude more for their time than the receptionist, it's far more effective to have more receptionists for the work either of them could do.

The trick is to pay doctors less, a country can easily lower doctor salaries by educating more doctors, there is no lack of people who want to be doctors.

As I understand it, "educating more doctors" in the US is a lot more complicated than it sounds. There's a number of different organizations involved, each setting their own limits for their "step" of the process; and there's motivation to not increase the throughput.

Re: Nonprofit hospitals skimp on charity while CEOs reap millions, report finds

#147

Post by giardini »

carlosjobim wrote: post #128
giardini wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And we should eliminate nonprofits entirely: 1. Churches, hospitals et al should all pay taxes just as do other corporations. They are built on the same social structure as other entities, have the same protection of government and benefit from the social system. I pay; so should they. 2. Campaign Finance Reform: Secondly, laws should be changed so that corporations are no longer "persons". That is Citizens_Unit…

> I pay; so should they. They don't pay and neither should you. Why is it that when people are oppressed, their biggest desire is never to be free, but to see others suffer the same as them?

b/c taxation of citizens by a government has, in most cases, proven to be necessary. I don't view that as necessarily oppressive. I'm just saying "everyone should pay".

And given a choice between no government and government I would usually prefer a government.

Re: Nonprofit hospitals skimp on charity while CEOs reap millions, report finds

#148

Post by jackfoxy »

bombcar wrote: post #40
jackfoxy wrote: post #29

Think of nonprofit not as another term for benevolent or charitable organization (which is what people instinctively think), but as an alternative tax accounting scheme. Excess revenue gets funneled to the insiders at the top so that at tax year end there is no profit . Presumably these insiders are paying income tax. I once knew a guy who worked in the field of providing services to non-profits, and he described to…

It's quite likely that if you have two organizations - one setup as a for-profit company, one setup as a non-profit, that the government gets more taxes from the non-profit because the for-profit company can "reinvest profits" into whatever, driving the share prices up, which is (if done right) is a non-taxable event for everyone, as long as the shareholders don't sell. Whereas the non-profit that funnels excess into…

The insider class gets its lifestyle boosted to aristocracy tax free because it is all for business, or rather operating expenses.

Re: Nonprofit hospitals skimp on charity while CEOs reap millions, report finds

#149

Post by Projectiboga »

RHSeeger wrote: post #146
Jensson wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is to pay doctors less, a country can easily lower doctor salaries by educating more doctors, there is no lack of people who want to be doctors.

As I understand it, "educating more doctors" in the US is a lot more complicated than it sounds. There's a number of different organizations involved, each setting their own limits for their "step" of the process; and there's motivation to not increase the throughput.

The supply of MDs & DOs has been kept very low compared to our population growth. The US ends up poaching Drs from around the world. But the actual biggest cost in our medical system is the excessive high administration costs, above the Medicare admin level of 3% it's about 27-29% extra with private insurance and the medical billing side. We have about 27% uninsured. The money is there and going single payer would create savings by delaying lag to care, it would increase preventive care and have a lot of second order savings like with liability insurance. The estimates are at least 3/4 of Americans would save money the first year.
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