CEO gets patients' view of complicated healthcare system

Guest post by Lynn McVey, CEO and president of Meadowlands Hospital Medical Center, an acute care, 230-bed hospital in New Jersey

For this month's blog post, I planned to continue my theme of expensive variations in healthcare management, particularly the variation in executive salaries between for-profit and nonprofit facilities.

Conservative estimates demonstrate the median for-profit CEO salary is around $300,000, while the median nonprofit CEO salary ranges around $600,000. Setting the national standard at the for-profit median could mean a $1.5 billion drop in healthcare spending. I now join the ranks of those writers who recently called this variation the "800-pound gorilla."

However, a personal journey I took throughout our healthcare system this week interrupted my blogging plan--when my 92-year-old father entered three hospitals via three ambulances in three days for life-saving interventions.

>> Read the full commentary at Hospital Impact