On Thursday, Jan. 23, a coalition of Vermont state legislators and healthcare workers, in partnership with the office of Senator Bernie Sanders, unveiled a bill that would task the Green Mountain Care Board with moving healthcare resources to the front lines of patient care amidst a deepening healthcare crisis.
The bill, which was introduced on Friday in the Senate, would cap hospital executive and clinical leadership compensation to no more than 10 times that of the lowest-paid patient-facing staff. It would also require that the ratio of hospital administrative to clinical expenses is in-line with national averages.
“Who is constantly asked to sacrifice amidst Vermont’s healthcare crisis?” asked Senator Tanya Vyhovsky, lead sponsor of the bill in the Senate. “So far, it has been patients and Vermont healthcare workers who have faced high insurance rates and medical debt, alongside service cuts, closures, and declining health outcomes. This bill moves our healthcare resources to the front lines of the crisis by eliminating unnecessary spending in the system.”
“We cannot keep cutting from the most vulnerable or from those providing services,” said Nicole DiVita, co-president of AFT Vermont and VP for Technical Professionals of Vermont Federation of Nurses & Health Professionals (VFNHP). “We heard from the 2024 Oliver Wyman report repeatedly that there is excessive administrative spending at UVM Medical Center. UVM Health Network is paying almost half a million dollar bonuses to the CEO while cutting patient services from essential healthcare services.”
Representative Mari Cordes said: “As a registered nurse employed at UVM Medical Center for 24 years, and a past president of VFNHP, I have sat across the bargaining table from hospital executives and their labor attorney while they told us that while hospital executives deserved high compensation and benefits to make sure they could recruit qualified leaders, but that the same reasoning didn’t apply to front line staff.”
“Our healthcare system is not immune from the exponential widening of the inequality gap we are seeing nationwide,” said Representative Esme Cole, lead sponsor of a forthcoming sister bill to be introduced in the House of Representatives. “We have become so complicit in these trends, in fact, that when budgets get ‘tight,’ the suggested remedy is not a cut at the top, but rather in the programs that affect Vermont’s most vulnerable, such as our dialysis clinics, or the residential psychiatric unit. This trend will continue to go unchecked if we do not intervene.”
According to the most recent publicly available data, there were 113Vermont hospital executives and clinical leaders making over $312,000 in total annual compensation — approximately 10 times the annual salary of a starting-wage LNA at a Vermont hospital.
“One thing that I know from my colleagues is that we cannot afford healthcare,” said Heather Bauman, co-vice president of AFT Vermont and president of UVMMC Support Staff United. “We cannot afford to access the services that we work so diligently and compassionately to provide every day. We are asking for more equity so that we can afford the services that we provide to the community — and we look forward to the administrators and executives joining us in this struggle in finding more equity in this system that has lots of room to grow equity.”
“[UVM Health Network CEO] Sunny Eappen’s half million dollar bonus is Vermont patients’ money. Giving him that bonus would have paid for three advanced practice nurses to work here,” said Deb Snell, president of VFNHP. “What is more important?”
“One of the ways we can change [our healthcare system] is looking at how much we are spending on patient care, and how much we are spending on administrative costs,” said Kathryn Van Haste, state director for Senator Bernie Sanders. “By looking at executive pay, it is also an opportunity to get to equity for the people who work at the bedside, who work with patients. We cannot look those workers in the eye and say that their jobs matter less than the person who is moving papers on their desk. We have to acknowledge that there has to be more equity in the system between our executives and our frontline workers.”
