In his “Stories I’d Like to See” column, journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill spotlights topics that, in his opinion, have received insufficient media attention. This article was originally published on Reuters.com.
1. Looking at ‘Ratchet, Ratchet and Bingo’:
In his 2006 annual report to shareholders , Warren Buffett had this to say about compensation consultants:
Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance. That won’t change, moreover, because the deck is stacked against investors when it comes to the CEO’s pay. The upshot is that a mediocre-or-worse CEO — aided by his handpicked VP of human relations and a consultant from the ever-accommodating firm of Ratchet, Ratchet and Bingo – all too often receives gobs of money from an ill-designed compensation arrangement.
Buffett went on to explain how these consultants simply make outsized pay in any industry the norm by ratcheting up the average, so that all executives in a given “peer group” have to get what everyone else gets:
Additionally, the committee is told about new perks that other managers are receiving. In this manner, outlandish “goodies” are showered upon CEOs simply because of a corporate version of the argument we all used when children: “But, Mom, all the other kids have one.” When comp committees follow this “logic,” yesterday’s most egregious excess becomes today’s baseline.
During his talk a year ago at the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting, when Buffett called these compensation consultants prostitutes, his vice chairman Charles Munger objected. “Prostitution would be a step up for them,” Munger said.
I came across this ratchet phenomenon when I reported my story about soaring health care costs in the March 4 issue of Time. I asked an executive at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center how it was that executives at hospitals like his make so much more than people in similar positions at other large nonprofit organizations. As an example I used the fact that Sloan Kettering’s chief fundraiser makes $1,483,000, compared to $392,000 for the chief fundraiser at Harvard. His answer was disarmingly, if alarmingly, candid: “All of us hospitals have the same compensation consultants, so I guess it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.” By which he meant that if the same consultants are setting salaries across the hospital industry, then they will define the average in the peer group, and, of course, they can keep defining it up.
In honor of Buffett having just concluded his latest shareholder love-fest in Omaha last weekend, Reuters, Bloomberg, or the Wall Street Journal ought to do a major project on compensation consultants. Who dominates the setting of executive pay in which industries? How do they do their work? On what basis do they get paid? How do they deal with conflicts? Does any firm puncture the stereotype of Buffett’s Ratchet, Ratchet and Bingo?
In fact, the best story would be one that finds a compensation consultant who is well known for advising board compensation committees that their executives are making too much money. Who knows? Maybe there’s someone carving out that specialty working for activist shareholders. Or maybe there’s someone now working at a laundromat or car wash who tried that approach.
2. The coming of Al Jazeera America:
This story from Crain’s Chicago Business reports that “Al Jazeera America, a new U.S.-based extension of the media organization funded by the Qatar government,” is hiring 800 American journalists, including eight reporters and producers for a Chicago bureau, plus 10 other bureaus in cities like Seattle and Dallas, a 120-person Washington office, and a major New York home base. Having spent $500 million to buy Al Gore’s Current TV — which was a business failure but still managed to get placement in tens of millions of cable and satellite TV homes — Qatar is obviously planning to make a serious splash.
So, it’s about time Al Jazeera America got some serious treatment from the press (beyond the stories of Al Gore cashing in with oil money). First, are those numbers — especially the claimed plan to hire 800 journalists — real? That’s almost as many journalists as The New York Times employs around the world.
And who’s really going to decide what they report? Is this likely to be a serious addition to the TV news line-up that will provide welcome, honest competition for cable news channels that are increasingly more about talk and punditry than reporting? Or, are the suspicions of those who see something more sinister in a government, especially a Middle East oil power, financing such a large and well-distributed news channel justified?
3. Crime victims and medical bills:
In the wake of the Boston Marathon terrorist attack, we’ve seen lots of comforting stories about how Boston area hospitals are forgiving the bills of the injured victims, many of whom are reported to have faced tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills as they recover from having had limbs amputated. Insurance companies have also been reported to be waiving co-payments or deductibles for the victims, while charities have been organized and richly funded to cover other recovery needs.
It’s a pet peeve of mine that the reports of the amount of the bills — and, therefore, the hospitals’ claimed charity — don’t take into account that the hospitals are using their wildly inflated list prices (called “chargemaster” prices), not the amounts they usually get paid, let alone their actual costs. Hospitals routinely tout their charity using these inflated amounts, rather than the cost of the care. Still, it’s great that the victims have been relieved of this burden.
However, I’ll bet that some time during the day or week of the Marathon bombing someone in Boston without adequate insurance was seriously injured by a mugger or drunk driver and is now stuck with the kinds of bills the bombing victims would have faced.
If, as is highly likely, he or she did lack adequate insurance, these victims of more common crimes might now be getting dunned for those inflated chargemaster bills. Indeed, I know from writing about healthcare billing that thousands of crime victims across the country regularly face this double jeopardy assault on their bodies and then on their wallets.
There are varieties of crime victims’ compensation funds across the country, but the degree to which there are publicized and their effectiveness varies dramatically. I’d like to see an ambitious reporter find a poorly insured mugging or drunk driving victim injured in Boston the week of the bombing and use the difference in aid extended to him or her as a departure point to explore all of that. (It may turn out that Massachusetts has an effective compensation regime for all victims, but if that were the case why all the hoopla over the aid extended to those injured in the Marathon bombing?)
The rationale for aiding terrorism victims more readily than other crime victims is that we want to show the terrorists that as a community we will unite to mitigate the damage they do. Even if one accepts that argument, questions remain about disparate treatment. The 9/11 victims got a government victims compensation fund. The Oklahoma City bombing victims and the Boston victims had to rely on private aid. How come? Why not have a statute that defines the kind of terrorism attack that merits federal compensation? Have any public officials proposed a law like that? If not, why not? And if it has been proposed, why hasn’t it passed?
Steven Brill , the author of Class Warfare: Inside the Fight To Fix America’s Schools, has written for magazines including New York, The New Yorker, Time, Harper’s, and The New York Times Magazine. He founded and ran Court TV, The American Lawyer magazine, ten regional legal newspapers, and Brill’s Content magazine. He also teaches journalism at Yale, where he founded the Yale Journalism Initiative.