Salinas is a poor-ish rural California town down Highway 101 from Silicon Valley, and the financial contrast between the two is similar to that between Beverly Hills  and Bell, a California city where officials’ salaries sparked national outrage and then arrests. Now it turns out that the CEO of the local Salinas community hospital got a $4m retirement pay-out and a $150,000 a year pension and managed to stay on in his job for another two years at $668,000 a year and when he retired last week he got another payment of nearly $900,000. Can we expect the same in the Salinas case as in Bell? I doubt it because that would expose to the world that there are thousands of community hospitals all over America paying their CEOs the same kind of money–ignoring the $1 million + salaries most AMCs dole out.  Can running a 300 bed hospital really be that difficult?