Past couple weeks I’ve been learning all sorts of shocking stuff about health care systems and insurance company dirty dealings. I’ll admit, it had been the least of my interests, but life is full of surprises. Partly because of a personal experience, partly because of a flippant letter to the editor of a local paper by a mighty CEO and all I learned since I started checking his claims, I’ve become an active advocate for ColoradoCare and a YES vote on Amendment 69.
I heard an interesting argument that some around here might like to kick around a little, thus I’m sharing it.
This particular argument started with an article by Wendell Potter bemoaning extravagant and increasing CEO compensation packages.
Rising to Wendell’s challenge Chris Conover over at Forbes wrote an article sharing an epiphany.
He takes CEO pay and divides it by all the employees, presto, see there CEOs aren’t milking anyone.
It’s a great fantasy argument and I’m sure his math holds. But …
Conover deftly skips over the reason for the outrage at health insurance company executives with his little math trick.
I’ll let them tell it, then I’m going to toss in my two cents worth and invite anyone to join in.
First Mr. Potter:
Skyrocketing Salaries for Health Insurance CEOs By Wendell Potter, Center for Public Integrity | Commentary | June 10, 2014 http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/24280-skyrocketing-salaries-for-health-insurance-ceos If health insurance companies announce big premium increases on policies for 2015, I hope regulators, lawmakers and the media will look closely at whether they are justified, especially in light of recent disclosures of better-than-expected profits in 2013, rosy outlooks for the rest of this year and soaring CEO compensation. Almost all of the publicly traded health insurers reported big increases in revenue and profits last year. The big winners have been the top executives of those companies, led by Mark Bertolini, CEO of Aetna, the nation’s third largest health insurer. Bertolini’s total compensation of $30.7 million in 2013 was 131 percent higher than in 2012. …Mr. Conover's response over at Forbes:
What If We Confiscated CEO Compensation For Large Health Insurers And Redistributed It To Members? Chris Conover | March 31, 2016 http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2016/03/31/what-if-we-confiscated-the-compensation-for-large-health-insurers-and-redistributed-it-to-members/#7a28765c7f01 Last month, AEI’s Mark Perry posted an interesting hypothetical: What if the compensation for all S&P 500 CEOs were confiscated and redistributed to rank-and-file workers? [1] It turns out that this redistribution would lift average worker pay by 3 cents an hour–truly peanuts in a world in which the average American worker earns more than $25 per hour.{*} In light of the persistent low opinion that many Americans and policymakers seem to have about “greedy health insurers" and “ skyrocketing salaries for health insurance CEOs," I thought it would be interesting to conduct a parallel exercise for the nation’s very largest health insurers. How much money might the average plan member save if only we could confiscate the allegedly “eye-popping" (former industry “insider" Wendell Potter’s characterization) CEO compensation paid to executives of the nation’s largest health insurers? The answer? Peanuts. …Mr Conover misses the point. It’s not about redistributing those dollars among the tens of thousands of workers out there. It's about distributing that money back into the healthcare system and making health care job one. Something that is decidedly not the case under our current self-interested corporate leadership and the awful system they have created for us. There’s more to this than objection to that sense of entitlement among corporate executes. There’s the problem of how they manage to justify those excessive bonus packages. They justify them by squeezing every ounce of profit, no matter how amoral the means of achieving those savings and extra profits, out of their systems. Let me spell it out: It's the absolutely self-interested and amoral corporate mentality that's problem one! Their profits obsessed CEO mind-set is killing us down here. We object not just to executive's obscene incomes but to their entire myopic self-interested approach to health care! That’s why so many are working to get Colorado's ColoradoCare Amendment 69 passed. Yes it is a “socialist" plan in a sense. So what? After all, we humans are social animals, so get over it! We The People have the right to demand that the money we spend on health care goes into providing quality compassionate healthy care - and not paying for minds that are constantly scheming on how to take more for themselves. {As for that $25.00/hr average pay rate. In your dreams. Sure, it holds for a select segment, but the bigger picture isn't near as rosy. For those details visit http://amendment69-info-kiosk.blogspot.com/2016/09/response-to-cconovers-response-to.html}