Quick Hits: Seeking Scapegoats

The massive deleveraging taking place in our economy, for all its impact, lacks suspense. When the dominoes start falling, the eventual result is known beforehand. That is why I can leave town for a week, dabble at farming in the Berkshires in the June sunshine, return home, learn of top executives at Lehman Brothers walking the plank during my absence, and not be surprised. I offered in my June 4 post that Dick Fuld's tenure as CEO was at risk. Turns out that the CFO and COO took the fall instead.

I fail to see how guys like Fuld can, or should, escape. These corporate execs get paid obscene amounts of money and should be held accountable when things go awry. Their compensation and severance packages should be heavily taxed (hear that, John McCain?). As they say on the farm, manure is a good thing only if it is spread around. Piled in one place, it stinks. The same thing goes for money.

[update, June 27:]
Bloomberg News is reporting that CEO Fuld will forgo his bonus in 2008. Last year Fuld made $40 million, less than a million of which was his actual salary. The rest was his bonus. How's the guy going to carry on without it?

Who pays for fixing medical mistakes? Sadly, it is either the patient (the victim) or those who pay insurance premiums (the rest of us, which makes us victims as well). Massachusetts wants to change all that. Yesterday state officials, in concert with the state's largest private health insurer (Blue Cross and Blue Shield), announced that hospitals or doctors may no longer bill for the costs of extra care following any of 28 different types of screw-ups. The extra costs may range from hundreds of dollars per case for preventable bed sores to thousands for post-surgical infections.

This cost-containment measure is long overdue--and essential if affordable health coverage is to be extended to the entire population. Again, it is all about holding perpetrators accountable. Until recently practitioners got away with medical errors, which went largely unreported. Who knew, for instance, that more people die in the U.S. each year from faulty treatment or diagnosis than from cancer!

American healthcare, when you think of it, is more like Russian roulette. When seeking services, there is a sizable chance that you will end up infected, indebted, disabled and/or drug-dependent. For that, you pay the highest per capita healthcare costs in the world. Now excuse me while I go for my aerobic workout.