July 25, 2005 - Pay levels for corporate executives have faced increased scrutiny, with proponents arguing the need for high salaries to attract the best and the brightest and critics challenging compensation packages that may have little to do with company performance. Questions about executive compensation now are extending to nonprofit organizations - particularly large nonprofit hospitals and health care systems. Before year's end, Congress expects to discuss the issue of nonprofits' compliance with the IRS intermediate sanctions, regulations that govern exempt organizations.
This timely topic is the focus of INQUIRY's first Dialogue, a feature in collaboration with the Alliance for Advancing Nonprofit Health Care that will offer a variety of voices on current, major issues as they arise in the nonprofit health sector. The debut article, "Executive Compensation in Nonprofit Health Care Organizations," will appear in the summer issue of INQUIRY and can be previewed now on the journal's Web site at www.inquiryjournalonline.org/inqronline/?request=index-html.
- Ken Ackerman, M.H.A., president of Clark Consulting-Healthcare Group in Minneapolis
- William E. Kibler, Jr., vice president of investments with Smith Barney, and immediate past chairman of the board of the AnMed Health System in Anderson, S.C., and its compensation committee
- Glenn D. Steele, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., president and CEO of the Geisinger Health System in Danville, Pa.
- R. Lawrence Van Horn, M.P.H., M.B.A., Ph.D., associate professor of economics and management at the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Rochester, in Rochester, N.Y.
- Katherine Swartz, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard School of Public Health, and editor of INQUIRY
- Bruce McPherson, M.H.A., executive director of the Alliance for Advancing Nonprofit Health Care, in Washington, D.C., moderator