Scandal = Executive pay cuts, unless…
Since arriving at my parents’ home in Florida a few days ago, I have been bombarded by radio and print advertisements concerning Health Management Associates (HMA), which owns dozens of hospitals across the country. The advertisements attack HMA for basing executive pay solely on profits, “even though HMA has been plagued by multiple government investigations, lawsuits, and scandals.” Sure enough, the website WrongWayHMA.org offers extensive documentation of these issues.
Naturally, I’m as opposed to health care scandals as the next person, so I found the campaign enlightening. The advertisements also got me thinking about another nationwide healthcare provider that has been plagued by multiple government investigations, lawsuits, and scandals: Planned Parenthood.
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| Cecile Richards and husband Kirk Adams |
Here’s where it gets interesting. The anti-HMA campaign is sponsored by “the doctors, nurses and caregivers of the Service Employees International Union.” The SEIU’s health care division is operated by long-time labor organizer Kirk Adams. And Kirk Adams is married to none other than Cecile Richards, the CEO of Planned Parenthood.
In short, scandals at clinics are bad, and the executives who oversee them ought to take a pay cut– unless it’s your wife, making $340,000 a year at the nation’s largest abortion chain.
The lame stream media has become a propaganda machine.
This thread was unnaturally derpy.
It went out of it's way to equate planned parenthood with privatisation of the health care system.
This post only makes sense to college republicans and fox news viewers.
Slow news day?
There's a pretty obvious difference between the "investigations" of Planned Parenthood and the federal criminal investigations of HMA. Glancing through your documentation, I see a congressional investigation (which isn't a criminal investigation), billing errors uncovered by audits, investigations of some clinics which "the national Planned Parenthood organization stripped… of their affiliation" due to financial and administrative problems (i.e., clinics that PP renounced and sundered from), some stuff about Live Action's heavily-edited "pimp videos," and various staff-level and affiliate-level errors and violations. For 820 locations, and 85 separate individual affiliations, that's not bad.
On the other hand, HMA shows, not employee-level errors, not billing mistakes, but possibility of corruption going all the way to the top.
See, for example: "Paul Meyer, HMA's former Director of Corporate Compliance, filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the Company in November 2011. Mr. Meyer claims he was terminated for raising compliance issues involving "the submission of fraudulent billing to Medicare through the improper admission of patients as inpatients even though such patients clearly did not meet the standards of inpatient admission" at four hospitals he monitored. Prior to working at HMA in 2006, he had just retired from a thirty year career with the Federal Bureau of Investigation where he spent three of those years as a supervisor for the health care fraud unit in Miami, Florida. The lawsuit is ongoing in Florida state court." Among numerous other allegations.
If Planned Parenthood is corrupt, rather than prone to human error (like all of us), cite me employees being terminated for notifying their superiors of regulatory issues. Cite me employees, like the Director of Compliance, being terminated for notifying superiors of compliance issues. Cite me evidence of deliberate unlawful conduct and suppression of whistleblowers going all the way up to Planned Parenthood headquarters.
Or admit that not all investigations–and not all crimes–are equal. Trayvon Martin's crime of marijuana use wasn't equal to George Zimmerman's crime of shooting him, and Planned Parenthood's scattered errors and violations are not equal to the alleged widespread corruption of HMA.
Also, if you're going to pretend to be outraged that the CEO of Planned Parenthood makes $340,000, you might also want to mention that the CEO of HMA (which, unlike PP, has "dozens," not hundreds, of hospitals) makes over $940,000 a year.
And, now that I got that out of my system, more to the point: SEIU is demanding that HMA take into account not just profits, but quality of service, when determining executive pay. Is that something that Planned Parenthood doesn't do? That's what you'd have to prove to discredit Kirk Adams (to discredit him by association, at least, which is a stretch, anyway). Whether either organization has ever been investigated is kind of a red herring. The real question is, what is the executive-level focus: profits, or quality health care?
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2012/may/22/hma-executive-pay-union-SEIU-shareholders-meet/
Wow thanks for the info. Interesting and disturbing.
Good blog! 🙂
HMA NEEDS A UNION FOR ALL WORKERS. IT IS THE ONLY WAY THEY CAN FEAR NOT BEING FIRED FOR TRYING TO DO THEIR JOB, I WAS ALWAYS TOLD IF YOU HAVE A UNION IN YOUR BUILDING YOU DESERVE IT AS YOU ARE NOT LISTENING TO YOUR EMPLOYEES. HMA SUCKS, DOESN'T CARE ABOUT ITS EMPLOYEES, FIRES PEOPLE FOR REPORTING THINGS THEY SHOULD.. MANAGEMENT IS THE WORST EVER.
THEY NEED A UNION WORSE THEN ANY ORGANIZATION I HAVE EVER SEEN..
STAFF AT HMA WAKE UP..
IF PAUL MEYERS WHO WORKED AS A FBI INVESTIGATOR IN HEALTH CARE FRAUD AND IN CHARGE OF CORP COMPLIANCE ISN'T HEARD DO YOU THINK THEY WILL LISTEN TO YOU>>>
GET A UNION AND FAST !!