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Monday, March 14, 2005

A Million Dollar CEO With More Than an Arm Around "the Medical Expense Trend"

Earlier, I noted how Charles Baker, the CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, in Massachusetts, scolded employees for their responsibility for rising health care costs. He stated, "if everybody keeps doing what they're doing , we will probably never get our arms around the medical expense trend."
To check Mr Baker's contribution to the "medical expense trend," I found Harvard Pilgrim's 990 forms, which are available on the Guidestar web site.
( Harvard Pilgrim is a not-for-profit organization. All such organizations with revenues greater than $25,000 must file annual disclosure forms with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). These must list compensation paid to their most highly paid employees. Guidestar maintains an on-line library of these forms, updated at least through 2003.)
Harvard Pilgrim's 2003 990 form showed that Mr Baker's total compensation was $1,045,336.
Maybe Mr Baker has more than an arm around "the medical expense trend."
Do I detect a whiff of hypocrisy here? By what moral authority does Mr Baker get to lecture employees about their responsibility for medical costs while he gets more than one million a year as the CEO of a not-for-profit one of whose ostensible goals is to control health care costs?

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