Christine Jordan Sexton
Gov. Rick Scott‘s blue-ribbon commission on health care and hospital spending asked Florida hospitals in May to provide the state with information about the salaries and compensation packages of their top executives.
Two months later, only four facilities have voluntarily provided that information, Agency for Health Care Administration Deputy Secretary Molly McKinstry told members of the Commission on Healthcare and Hospital Funding on Wednesday in Jacksonville.
Commission Chairman Carlos Beruff acknowledged there still is “a lot of missing information” but said the state won’t be deterred.
“We are going to get the data no matter what it takes to get it,” he said.
To that end, McKinstry said that the agency is making public records requests at government-owned facilities and noted that staff in the governor’s office has been combing through Internal Revenue Service tax filings to glean salary information.
McKinstry told the commission, though, that they won’t be able to find the information for for-profit facilities in IRS tax filings.
The largest for-profit hospital chain in the state is Hospital Corporation of America, which owns 45 Florida facilities. None of those facilities has provided information to the commission, according to information the agency has compiled on hospital responses.
Meanwhile, the information that staff has been able to gather is included in a 15-page chart that was briefly touched on by the commission at the meeting in Jacksonville on Wednesday.
Data collected to date shows that Isaac Mallah, president South Florida Baptist, a 147-bed facility, was the highest-paid executive in 2013 with a total compensation package of $3.3 million in 2013.
Stephen R. Mason, chief executive officer of the not-for-profit BayCare system, had a total compensation package of nearly $2.44 million in 2013. Sacred Heart Health System’s Susan Davis had a total compensation package of $2.4 million in 2013.
The governor created the commission in May via an executive order. He appointed nine members to the commission, most of them contributors to Scott’s campaign for governor or to his political committee, Let’s Get to Work.
Before the Jacksonville meeting adjourned, commission members Sam Seevers asked that another round of correspondence be sent to the hospitals requesting the salary and compensation information. Commission member Marili Cancio Johnson agreed and asked that the hospitals be told if they don’t provide the information that funding will be withheld from the facilities.
If there is no transparency, Johnson said, there should be no tax assistance.
