Sohn: Here's to Erlanger's comeback -- and windfall

Erlanger trustees on Thursday will be asked to approve a plan to give $400 bonuses to 3,300 employees after earning a record $37.3 million last year.

The board also has allocated another $2.1 million in bonuses (what Erlanger officials prefer to term "incentive" pay) for the hospital's top 124 managers, including $244,966 for Erlanger CEO Kevin Spiegel. With his incentive pay, Spiegel in fiscal year 2015 will make $981,000, or 7.2 percent more than the $914,669 he was paid last year.

There is some very good news in all or most of these numbers.

Erlanger CEO Kevin Spiegel speeds past an elevator repairman on one of his hospital rounds in this file photo.

Erlanger, a public hospital, previously had been on a downward trajectory in red ink, and by the end of 2013 had only 65 days of cash on hand. The organization was within five days of violating its bond covenants. With that in mind, the hospital's ability to end the last fiscal year with just shy of $40 million in profit is an unusual bright spot in what nationwide had become far too many days with gloomy health care news.

Another excellent point in Erlanger's new dawn is that the hospital's non-manager employees are getting to share in the comeback. Their $400 bonuses are the first companywide bonus checks for all employees in 11 years.

But the workers' total $1.4 million in rewards pales beside the $2.1 million in extra pay for Erlanger's top executives and managers.

While it's true that these managers have helped bring a turnaround of fortunes, one must wonder if some of that money wouldn't best be used to provide additional medical equipment, improved facilities or care for the poor.

Last year when Erlanger won, with our local delegation's help, $19 million in federal funding, then handed out a surprise raft of management incentives totaling $1.7 million to the top 99 executives, local lawmakers went into hyperventilation mode. This year Erlanger executives got the lawmakers on their side before the bonuses were announced. It certainly didn't hurt that hospital officials included rank-and-file workers in the cash rewards program.

It's also important to note that more people now have access to health care insurance, thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

In the fiscal year that ended June 30, the hospital boosted patient admissions by 9.4 percent and reported an increase in the number of surgeries by more than 7 percent.

Erlanger did well. And so did the ACA - better known as Obamacare.