From The Lowell Sun State House News Services

BOSTON — Hoping to spur lawmakers to act on an issue in which they’ve shown little interest, nurses are taking to the media with paid ads demanding a response from Beacon Hill to hospital CEO salaries and efforts within the industry to sock money away in off-shore accounts.

The Massachusetts Nurses Association, noting the July 2 deadline — one week away — for the Legislature to act on potential ballot questions, has launched statewide TV and radio ads depicting a pair of hospital CEOs, toasting glasses of champagne on a Cayman Islands beach, laughing and “enjoying a lavish taxpayer subsidized lifestyle,” according to the association.

The voiceover states Bay State hospitals receive millions of dollars in taxpayer funds and accuses the hospitals of refusing to disclose money stored in the Caymans.

The ads, which ask viewers to call their lawmakers for action on the bill, started on Monday and will run through July 2.

David Schildmeier, a spokesman for the nurses association, declined to divulge the size of the ad buy. Legislators have also been sent faux postcards from the Cayman Islands.

In 2013, proponents of the measure formed the Committee for Transparency and Fairness in the Use of Taxpayer Funds by Hospitals, which sponsored the ads.

The Massachusetts Medical Society opposes the proposal, with society President Richard Pieters recently calling the measure “unnecessary.”

Civil penalties included in the initiative appear “arbitrary and punitive,” he added.

“Penalties would be on hospitals whose profits exceed 8 percent, or whose CEOs receive compensation exceeding 100 times the hospital’s lowest-paid staff workers,” he said in a statement earlier this month. “These and other benchmarks have no discernible basis in science or any other objective measure.”

The initiative petition (H 3844), which would require hospitals to disclose all financial assets inside and outside the U.S., is currently listed as sitting in the Health Care Financing Committee.

According to a summary, one of the civil penalties would be imposed if a hospital CEO “receives annual compensation, including salary, bonuses, and benefits, that is more than 100 times greater than the annual compensation paid to a full time employee earning minimum wage, or if none, then the lowest-paid full time employee.”

For more on this story go to: http://www.lowellsun.com/latestnews/ci_26031895/nurses-group-unveils-ads-ceo-pay

IMAGE: www.massnurses.org

See iNews Cayman related stories:

Published June 23 2014 “TV and radio ads launched on hospital CEO’s receiving excessive pay and storing public funds in Cayman Islands” at: http://www.ieyenews.com/wordpress/tv-and-radio-ads-launched-on-hospital-ceos-receiving-excessive-pay-and-storing-public-funds-in-cayman-islands/

Published June 11 2014 “Radio ad highlights hospital CEOs’ excessive pay and money stashed in Cayman Islands” at: http://www.ieyenews.com/wordpress/radio-ad-highlights-hospital-ceos-excessive-pay-and-money-stashed-in-cayman-islands/