Montpelier
The 40 highest-paid hospital administrators in the state made at least $472,000 in 2014, compared with $391,000 in 2013, a signal that midlevel administrators are making more money.
The numbers come from a VTDigger analysis of each hospital’s public tax return, called Form 990, which the institutions must file with the Internal Revenue Service because of their nonprofit status.
VTDigger reviewed the most recent tax forms for all 14 hospitals in Vermont, plus Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, which is in Lebanon but gets 40 percent of its patients from Vermont.
Among the 15 hospitals, only two of the CEOs were women in 2014. Among the 40 highest-paid administrators in 2014, five were women. All administrators who made more than $1 million in 2014 were men.
Al Gobeille, the chairman of the Green Mountain Care Board, which is charged with controlling health care costs, including hospital budgets, declined to comment for this story. He pointed VTDigger to the Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems, a lobbying group.
“It’s critical for hospitals to attract and retain the most skilled employees, at every level, to maintain the highest quality care,” said Jeff Tieman, the CEO of the Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems. “That means providing competitive compensation for all positions, including leadership.”
“Hospital boards, which include members of the community, set salaries for hospital leadership using clearly defined policies to ensure fairness and stay consistent with the overall market for this unique and specialized skill set,” Tieman said.
Compensation for University of Vermont Medical Center administrators went down from 2013 to 2014, while compensation at Dartmouth-Hitchcock went up, and women continued to be underrepresented.
Scottie Ginn, the chairwoman of the compensation committee for the UVM Medical Center, said the administrator salaries were inflated for one year in 2013 because the hospital paid out deferred bonuses that the executives had earned in years prior.
Ginn said the compensation committee continues to set the base salary of Dr. John Brumsted, the chief executive, at the 50th percentile among his national peers. The committee offers three types of bonuses to Brumsted and the executive team that can reach the 65th percentile of comparable executives.
Brumsted’s base salary was $982,343 in 2014, up from $790,219 in 2013. His bonus pay was $361,620, down from $815,101 in 2013. The rest of his compensation comes from items like retirement accounts and health insurance.
The top 15 administrators listed at the hospital collectively made $7.9 million in 2014, compared with more than $9 million in 2013, largely because of the change in bonus rules. Only four executives aside from the CEO made more than $600,000, compared with nine in 2013.
At Dartmouth-Hitchcock, the hospital is reporting more administrators. The hospital’s Form 990 lists 43 administrators paid nearly $22 million in 2014, compared with 34 paid $16.3 million in 2013.
Compensation for Dr. James Weinstein, the chief executive officer, was $1,455,405 in 2014, compared with $1,034,293 in 2013. His base compensation was $1,145,559 in 2014, up from $945,851 the year before. He earned $209,341 in deferred compensation in 2014, versus $2,250 in 2013.
The hospital announced this month that Weinstein is stepping down in June when his current contract expires.
Representatives from Dartmouth-Hitchcock were not available for comment on this story.
Ginn said the UVM Medical Center’s board of trustees is aware of how few women work in hospital administration, but the Burlington hospital is doing comparatively well. Out of 15 administrators listed on the Form 990, four were women. Sandra Felis, the chief nursing officer, was the highest-paid female administrator, making $662,107.
Ginn, a retired engineer who worked for IBM, said her profession also tended to be dominated by men. She speculated that women in general may be less likely to choose careers in science, technology, engineering and math.
At Dartmouth-Hitchcock, 15 out of the top 43 administrators in 2014 were women. The highest-paid female administrator was Robin Kilfeather-Mackey, the chief financial officer, who made $735,130 in 2014. She departed D-H earlier this year after the hospital announced an unexpected budget crisis.
Proposals to limit how much hospital executives can make have sprung up across the country, but regulators in Vermont who are charged with lowering health care prices are not interested in regulating administrator pay.
A labor union in California has proposed a cap of $450,000 a year — the same amount the president of the United States makes. Advocates in Arizona had sought to have voters decide on Nov. 8 whether a hospital that pays administrators more than $450,000 would lose its license. The proposal was dropped in the face of a lawsuit.
In Vermont, liberal Democrat Peter Galbraith, who served as a state senator from 2011 to 2015 and ran for governor this year, proposed capping hospital administrator salaries at $350,000 a year.
That proposal was dead on arrival, and he won less than 10 percent of the vote in the August primary.
“The way in which CEO salaries are set is by hiring consultants who then do comparables to what CEOs make at other hospitals of the same size, health care networks,” Galbraith said in an interview. “So they, the hospitals, have an incentive to make their systems as large as possible to increase” their salaries.
“In my view, the Green Mountain Care Board has been derelict in not limiting administrative salaries,” he said. “(The board) calls it micromanagement, but it’s not. It’s very much the same process that exists in the corporate sector in which corporations participate in short-term behavior to … drive up stock prices.”
In 2015, the board’s hospital budget expert gave a presentation to the Vermont Legislature describing administrative costs at hospitals. In February, he recommended that the board figure out how to define administrative costs across hospitals so it can regulate administrative costs.
Gobeille said in 2015 that the board should not be involved in setting administrator pay. He is stepping down to become secretary of human services when Republican Phil Scott becomes governor in January.