Partners CEO got $1.9m last year
Compensation for other hospital chiefs closing in on $1m
Partners HealthCare System Inc., the biggest healthcare provider in New England and the corporate parent of Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's hospitals, paid chief executive James J. Mongan $1.9 million in total compensation and benefits last year, according to records released by the institution yesterday.
Meanwhile, annual compensation packages of individual hospital chief executives in Boston, including the two Partners flagships, are closing in on $1 million, according to the public disclosures:
James Mandell of Children's Hospital Boston received $978,955.
Paul Levy of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center got $957,477.
Gary L. Gottlieb of Brigham and Women's received $935,009.
Peter L. Slavin of Mass. General was paid $884,422.
Ellen Zane, who worked eight months of the year as the new chief executive at Tufts-New England Medical Center, received $590,131.
At an annualized rate, Zane's total package would have been worth about $860,000.
Mongan's overall compensation of nearly $2 million rose from $1.5 million in fiscal year 2003.
Partners trustees who serve on the organization's compensation committee said the increase reflects his first full year as Partners chief executive after his promotion from chief executive of Mass. General in January 2003. The trustees said it is just reward for running a $5 billion operation with six acute-care hospitals and the single most dominant position in Massachusetts healthcare.
''I'd like to believe that people that work in this category, healthcare providers, aren't doing it for the money. But that doesn't mean they should be treated like missionaries," said Jack Connors, chairman of the Hill Holliday advertising agency. He serves as chairman of the Partners board and of the Partners compensation committee.
''They shouldn't be paid the same as top bankers or industry people," he said, ''but they should not be penalized for being in public service."
Mongan earned a base pay of $849,750. He also received a cash bonus of $170,000, $350,000 in deferred compensation, and $544,878 worth of retirement contributions and other benefits, according to Partners.
Partners yesterday released an analysis that showed Mongan's $1.9 million package ranked 13th in chief-executive compensation for big, nonprofit healthcare systems in the United States and ninth among wage and benefit packages for the leaders of big teaching hospitals.
''He more than justifies the salary that is being paid to him," said Edward P. Lawrence, a partner at Ropes & Gray LLP who is chairman of the board of Mass. General and a member of the Partners compensation committee.
Salaries for executives at big, charitable hospitals have risen quickly around the country over the last five years, following an Internal Revenue Service decision that changed the rules for deciding what is fair compensation among nonprofits, said Peter Frumkin, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
Now, hospital compensation boards are free to compare salaries for similar jobs at both nonprofit and for-profit corporations, he said. It is a similar situation to college football coaches, he said, who can now have their salaries set in comparison to coaches in the NFL.
''Now the world has changed," Frumkin said. ''It's made this question about what is reasonable much harder to pin down."
If Partners were a publicly traded corporation, its $5 billion in annual revenue would make it the ninth-largest among such firms based in Massachusetts, just behind Boston Scientific Corp. and State Street Corp.
Among Mongan's major accomplishments, said Lawrence, has been negotiating contracts with the three major health insurance companies -- Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, and Tufts Health Plan -- that were generous enough to give Partners doctors raises for the first time in nearly nine years.
Lawrence added that, while other mergers of academic medical centers foundered, both in New England and nationally, Mongan played an integral role in making the merged Partners system run well, first as Mass. General chief executive from 1996 to 2002 and then after his promotion. Before joining Mass. General, Mongan was executive director of Truman Medical Center in Kansas City for 15 years.
Partners and the other big nonprofit medical institutions in Boston released disclosure forms yesterday, the same day they were due at Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly's public charities division, in response to requests from the Globe.
Among Boston's teaching hospitals and systems, Boston Medical Center and Caritas Christi Health Care, which operates six hospitals owned by the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, did not respond to the Globe's request for information.
Corey Welford, a spokesman for Reilly, said the public charities division did not know if it had received those forms yesterday, because they arrived amid a flood of filings from thousands of charities.
If the disclosures are mailed and postmarked as of yesterday's date, they are not in violation of state disclosure laws, Welford said.
Christopher Rowland can be reached at crowland@globe.com. 