By Jim Stanford on March 14, 2007
Wyoming Blue Cross/Blue Shield is raising its rates again next month, by about 20 percent.
The cost of an MRI at St. John’s Medical Center is about $1,300.
But if you’re the St. John’s CEO, you’re moving into a $2.5 million house the hospital just bought you, while making nearly $500,000 a year.
The St. John’s Hospital Foundation, the medical center’s fund-raising arm, purchased the house last month in the Panorama Estates subdivision near Jackson Hole Airport. Similar properties in the neighborhood have been listed for $2.5 million.
Here’s what the foundation says about its current campaign:
The current focus of the Foundation’s fundraising effort is the $10.8 million Expansion Campaign “Caring for the Future.” Although a new hospital facility was built by St. John’s in 1991, it quickly became too small to meet the healthcare needs of area residents and visitors.
Sources close to the hospital confirmed that the house is for new CEO Jim Schuessler, who will pay rent. However, his contract calls for him to receive a housing stipend of $34,000 per year, according to a Jan. 17 article in the News&Guide.
Schuessler’s contract calls for him to be paid a base salary of $295,000, plus nearly $24,000 in savings and annuity contributions. He can earn a bonus of up to $73,750 per year, and he received $38,000 for a new four-wheel-drive Volkswagen.
An additional $11,000 in life and disability insurance and other perks brings his total compensation to more than $475,000, not including the cost of health and dental insurance for him and his wife, according to the News&Guide.
His contract is in line with what other hospital CEOs are paid around the country.
Perhaps that’s part of the reason why we’re all paying too much for health care.
Posted under business
i would love to say i am surprised, but, well…. this is another example of how this institution does whatever it can to get whatever it wants.
my guess is that the old rev. and other flacks on the board discussed this in their negotiations with Schuessler, who by the way is way more trouble than old Ronny O. the ignorant board realized that it could never get away with buying a $2.5 million home without public scrutiny. so instead it turned that dirty job over to the foundation. why was this never announced when schuessler signed his contract? we heard about everything negotiated but this.
i wonder who has the mortgage? doesn’t the foundation’s pres, jim lewis, do something at jackson state bank? his wallet is getting fatter i suppose. i just heard the foundation’s agent, ed liebzeit, is also a board member. and he took commission. again, somebody’s wallet is getting fatter. the whole thing reeks of the inherent problems at that center: running the hospital to benefit a few to the detriment of many.
so while the vacant nursing positions remain open, bad debt continues to sore, and us working-class folks can’t pay our medical bills because prices have nearly increased 50 percent in five years (i’ll bet they increase this year, too), at least it’s comforting to know that our publicly funded medical center is taking care of us. i’m tipping one back now. here’s to our health!!
Like the site! No sense in understatement. There is NO MAYBE about the fact that Administrator/CEO, and all white-collar outrageous salaries, most of which have no correlation to performance or job difficulty, are a LARGE contributor to the price inflation of ALL American products and services.
An EVEN bigger cause of our over-priced economy is the ridiculous income tax system, which handicaps both American business and American taxpayer-consumers.
I am a big booster for the Fair Tax (HR 25, S 25). See http://www.fairtax.org. That well-written legislation has languished in the in-box of the House Ways and Means Committee at least since 1996. It would give every American worker an instant 10-39% raise in take-home pay, make all American goods considerably less-expensive on international markets, require everybody, including rich people and foreign tourists, criminals and even illegal immigrants to pay their fair share of the cost of running our federal government.
The Fair Tax Bill would make April 15th just another Spring day, eliminate the adversarial relationship between our citizens and the WORST department of our federal government (with the exception of the current Administration.) So WHY has it never been sent to the House floor for a vote? 80% of Congress are lawyers. Lawyers make their biggest and easiest money protecting their clients from the big bad IRS.
There IS a ray of hope. Last I knew, there were more than 50 cosponsors of the Bill in Congress. Believe it or not, Barbara Cubin is one of them.
Unfortunately, liberals have a knee-jerk negative reaction to sales taxes, insisting that they are “regressive”. In reality, the Fair Tax would be a LOT more progressive than the existing income tax system, and a WHOLE LOT simpler.
This Nation is broken, and until we stop treating our honest citizens like criminals, and our criminals like high government officials, we’ll never fix it.