Shared sacrifice?

Here in the patch, we couldn't help but feel saddened by the pain conveyed by Uniontown Hospital CEO Paul Bacharach, as conveyed in the un-bylined Herald-Standard.com story, "Uniontown Hospital lays off 25." (July 26, 2011)

Most of these job cuts came in the business, service, maintenance and clerical departments, said Bacharach, who informed the reading public that the cuts were due to reductions in state and federal reimbursements in Medicare and Medicaid.

Those two programs, which provide health insurance for the elderly and the poor, cover a whopping 80 percent of the hospital's patients, said Bacharach. (And while that is a statistic that doesn't seem to jive with all the pronouncements that the county is on the move economically, that's a matter for another day.)

"While we regret being forced to trim our expenses, we simply can't ignore the fact that decisions in Washington, D.C., and Harrisburg have dramatically affected our budget," said Bacharach. " ... we have no choice but to adjust our expenses to be more in line with what hte government decides to pay us for those services."

The fact that this front-page story carried no byline by a reporter is a powerful clue that it was a hospital press release, printed verbatim as submitted by the hospital heirarchy. That is a sad substitute for real news produced by a real reporter.

If a good reporter had been assigned to the story, perhaps they could have added just a little bit of balance and perspective, don't you think? We visited our favorite free website, Guidestar.com, which allows you to look at the federal tax reports filed by all nonprofit organizations.

There, we found Uniontown Hospital's tax form for 2009, the last year available online. And under Schedule J, Part II, the listing of highest compensated employees, we found Paul Bacharach.

His total compensation package for 2009, for running a hospital where 80 percent of patients are covered by Medicare and Medicaid, was $507,464. (That's not a misprint; the total is over a half-million dollars.) Here is the breakdown, which you can view yourself if you take the time: base compensation $287,582, other reportable compensation $19,275, retirement and deferred compensation $167,636 and nontaxable benefits $33,153.

Those numbers make it easier for us to understand when Bacharach says that expense reductions are necessary "because we simply can't spend more than we are paid for the services we provide."

At least when it comes to employees at the lower rungs of the pay scale, that appears to be the case.

Bacharach isn't alone in being a highly paid hospital employee. According to the tax form, Steven Handy had a 2009 base compensation of $184,954 and total compensation of $328,442, and William Johnson had a 2009 base of $121,212 and total of $151,931.

Add them up and you have $988,019 going to three top hospital employees in a single year. (And that was two years ago, the last for which the information is available.)

We don't doubt that Uniontown Hospital, and lots of other hospitals, are going through tough times. Nor do we doubt that skilled leaders are needed to steer them through those choppy waters.

But we have serious doubts that in Uniontown Hospital's case, the pain is being shared at all rungs of the employee ladder.