Democrats demonize HMO exec’s high salaries

You can tell when the losers are desperate, because they start throwing mud and demonizing their opponents.

 

You can tell when the losers are desperate, because they start throwing mud and demonizing their opponents. Wednesday Democrat opponents of the Medicare drug benefits bill brought up the high salaries of HMO executives. This act of class warfare probably won’t work but will warm the hearts of the wealth envious voters at home.

A $15 million salary looks huge until it’s compared with the total value of the executive’s company and the value he or she has added or is in the process of adding. If an executive’s added $1.5 or $2.5 billion to the value of his firm, why shouldn’t he get a 10% to 20% commission? Problem is that a lot of top executives take their “commissions” even when their companies lose value, which is why critics can carp to a sympathetic audience.

 

Impact graphs in this Reuters Health report on Yahoo News:

 

 

Lawmakers Wednesday drew attention to an annual report from the consumer group Families USA detailing the salaries and stock option compensation of 20 CEOs of firms likely to carry Medicare benefits in the plan. 

 

“They have made a clear choice of again supporting those executives of America’s largest insurance companies,” Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, the ranking member of the Energy and Commerce health subcommittee said of House Republican leaders. 

 

The highest paid executive in the report was former Oxford Health Plans CEO Norman C. Payson, who last year was paid a salary of $76,010,825. Leonard D. Schaeffer, chairman and CEO of WellPoint was second on the list with a salary of $21,765,532, according to the report, which is based on public filings with the Security and Exchange Commission. 

 

The average salary of the 20 highest-paid executives on the list was approximately $15 million, said Ron Pollack, Families USA’s president.  UnitedHealth CEO William W. McGuire held nearly $530,000,000 in unexercised stock options in 2002, the report stated. 

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