$2 million a year salaries for 2 Waterloo Iowa doctors under fire

<http://www.dmregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050526/NEWS/505260388/1001>

Do you suppose these doctors are examples of those unable to practice "their love" across the country due to high malpractice rates? I guess a $1-2 million per year salary makes a $20 thousand malpractice premium seems somewhat quaint.

Here is a the most appalling part of the story:

Like all Iowa hospitals, Covenant is classified as a nonprofit organization, which exempts it from paying taxes on its income, property or sales. Industry leaders defend the exemptions, saying they more than make up the tax difference by providing large amounts of free care to needy people.

However, in the same year that it was paying doctors more than $2 million apiece, Covenant reported that it provided less than $2 million worth of charity care. That was about 1 percent of its patient revenue, which is about a third of the state average, according to the Iowa Hospital Association.

is all we can call these CEO "compensation packages." These docs probably feel put upon when they read about the average salary package of a Fortune 500 CEO, one that's averaging about 100 million bucks a year. They don't see the sick people they're depriving of care. They only see that they're far behind their peers in other corporations. They will continue to cut staffing and deny care to the sick so that they can more closely resemble the rest of the CEO community.

We need a government that will stand for the people and against the rich. We need a tax code that will stand as a disincentive to this sort of greed and that will prevent all wealth from concentrating away from the people who create it and into the hands of the few. The tragedy is that we'll probably see a new Great Depression before any of this stuff is done. The horror is that it's now inevitable that we do see another depression.

My brother is an orthopedic nurse. He assists surgeons like the one in Waterloo when they operate and replace knees, hips, etc. He tells me that they use Craftsman tools that have been sterilized to saw bones and screw new parts together. That makes these surgeons high priced carpenters!

My brother said that there is virtually no blood. Part of his job is to keep the "surgical field" dry and blood free while they saw and screw. That means any carpenter can wash his hands and then do the sawing and screwing. Maybe we should allow the "free market" to operate in medicine. I know a lot of carpenters who are as fussy as doctors and would happily work for $200,000, one tenth of what these guys made.