The president of MD Anderson is paid like someone running a prosperous business. Ronald DePinho’s total compensation last year was $1,845,000. That does not count outside earnings derived from a much publicized waiver he received from the university that, according to the Houston*Chronicle, allows him to maintain unspecified “financial ties with his three principal pharmaceutical companies.”.....
And in our largest cities, the system offers lavish paychecks even to midlevel hospital managers, like the 14 administrators at New York City’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who are paid over $500,000 a year, including six who make over $1*million......
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the pharmaceutical and health-care-product industries, combined with organizations representing doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, health services and HMOs, have spent $5.36*billion since 1998 on lobbying in Washington. That dwarfs the $1.53*billion spent by the defense and aerospace industries and the $1.3*billion spent by oil and gas interests over the same period. That’s right: the health-care-industrial complex spends more than three times what the military-industrial complex spends in Washington.....
But Medtronic’s October 2012 quarterly SEC filing reported that its spine “products and therapies,” which presumably include Steve H.’s device, “continue to gain broad surgeon acceptance” and that its cost to make all of its products was 24.9% of what it sells them for. That’s an unusually high gross profit margin — 75.1% — for a company that manufactures real physical products. Apple also produces high-end, high-tech products, and its gross margin is 40%. If the neurostimulator enjoys that company-wide profit margin, it would mean that if Medtronic was paid $19,000 by Mercy Hospital, Medtronic’s cost was about $4,500 and it made a gross profit of about $14,500 before expenses for sales, overhead and management — including CEO Omar Ishrak’s compensation, which was $25*million for the 2012 fiscal year.....
