Kindred Executive's Deep Appreciation

StrangeTony.

On this Thanksgiving it's important for Kindred/Gentiva employees to show our appreciation for the kind words executives share during quarterly earnings analyst calls.  This comes from the August Q2 earnings call.

Let me start as I usually do by extending my deep appreciation on behalf of the entire leadership team to our more than 100,000 teammates across the country. Each day, our partners at Kindred work hard to improve the lives of the more than 1 million patients we care for. The excellent care delivery and clinical outcomes we generate are the direct result of their efforts.

Here's the most recent Q3 call from early November:

Let me start as I usually do by extending my deep appreciation on behalf of the entire leadership team to our more than 100,000 team mates across the country. Each day our partners at Kindred work hard to improve the lives of the more than 1 million patients we care for annually. The excellent care, delivery and clinical outcomes we generate are the direct results of their efforts.

Those employees finished enrolling in benefits for 2016 and many found worse health insurance and diminished paid time off benefits in the newly integrated Kindred.  Is this what Kindred President Ben Breier meant when he spoke to analysts in August?

But we just received back our employee engagement surveys last week. We do an employee engagement survey on the whole company, and I would say it's a good time to be at Kindred. The culture is very strong here and we'll continue to make sure that we keep our ear to the ground and do right by our employees.

Oddly, he didn't bring up the survey in the November call.  The survey is a faded memory at our hospice site.  All the talk of doing better has been followed by virtually no action.

A recent SEC filing shows who benefits from the direct result of more than 100,000 teammates.

On November 25, 2015, a subsidiary of Kindred Healthcare, Inc. (the “Company”) entered into an Agreement with Mr. Stephen D. Farber, the Company’s Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, pursuant to which Mr. Farber will receive a one-time payment of $250,000 to offset relocation and other costs incurred by Mr. Farber in connection with his relocation to Louisville, Kentucky.

Mr. Farber served as CFO for Rural/Metro, an ambulance company that entered bankruptcy in August 2013.  The private equity arm of Warburg Pincus purchased Rural/Metro in March 2011.  Farber served as CFO for serial ethics abuser Tenet Healthcare until 2005 when he left to start an analytics company focused on collecting hospital bills.  Kindred hired Farber in February 2014.

Kindred Healthcare, Inc. (“Kindred” or the “Company”) (NYSE:KND) today announced the appointment of Stephen D. Farber as Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, effective February 3, 2014.

Who waits twenty months to come up with a moving package, especially as the company already had a contract with Mr. Farber?

 • The Committee entered into a new employment agreement with Mr. Farber, the Company’s new Chief Financial Officer, to complete the succession plan from the Company’s previous chief financial officer.

Farber's contract resulted in $1,889,389 in executive compensation for 2014, with over $110,000 in "relocation reimbursement."

The extra $250,000 smells like a way to push money to a fellow member of the executive team, which actually got a raise in 2014:.

 • The Committee approved base salary increases and equity awards for the executive officers to maintain competitive total direct compensation generally within the 25th to 50th percentile of the Company’s peers; and 

Kindred at Home President David Causby has a potential $1 million bonus based on achieving integration cost savings:

The integration of Gentiva in Kindred at Home continues to proceed extremely well. I'm very pleased to announce that we're on track to exceed our previously stated goal for synergy realization this year by approximately $10 million. We now expect to realize synergies of roughly $45 million during 2015 and we also believe that we're on track to exceed our stated goal of $70 million in synergies by the end of 2016 and we'll provide more specifics on our next quarterly conference call.

We'll see if the color on 2016 includes benefit savings, experienced as reductions by the more than 100,000 team mates.  Many people in our office have not seen a raise in years and are struggling to deal with rising healthcare expenses.

How can they appreciate us so deeply without knowing the slightest thing about us?  It's a shallow form of appreciation, akin to happiness from profiting off the backs of "teammates."  It's a one sided engagement.

Anonymous (from Gendred)