Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Where Our Health Care Dollars Go

by Pa Rock
Social Commentator

I heard a tidbit on the radio yesterday saying that Ed Hanway, the CEO of Cigna Health Care, was making over $30 million a year in salary. The person giving the report said Hanway made more in a day than many people made in a year. That caught my attention, so I hit the internets and found a site - www.prosperityagenda.us - that listed the current salaries of the CEOs of insurance companies. Listed below are the top ten earners with their annual salaries followed by what that translates to as a daily rate. (I did the ciphering to figure the daily rate, so let me know if you find any errors.)

H. Edward Hanway, Cigna Corp. $30,160,000 ($82,360 daily)
Ronald A. Williams, Aetna, Inc. $23,045,834 ($63,139)
David B. Snow, Jr., Medco Health $21,760.000 ($59,616)
Dale B. Wolf, Coventry Health Care, $20,860,000 ($57,150)
Michael B. McAllister, Humana, Inc $20,060,000 ($54,959)
Jay M. Gellert, Health Net $16,650,000 ($45,616)
Stephen J. Hemsley, United-Health Group $13,164,529 ($36,067)
Raymond McCaskey, Health Care Service Corp (BC/BS) $10,300,000 ($28,219)
Angela F. Braley, Wellpoint $9,094,771 ($24,917)
Michael F. Neidorff, Centene Corp $8,750,751 ($23,975)


The salaries listed for Aetna's CEO, Ronald A. Williams, and that of Centene's CEO, Michael F. Neidorff were as of 2007, so they are undoubtedly doing better than that in 2009.

How does some maggot like Ed Hanway manage to spend $82,360 per day? What is his own health care plan like? (I've had Cigna, and sorry Ed, but I'll take government run health care any day over the crap-on-a-cracker that your company offers!) And what about a bonus? Does Big Ed get a bonus to help supplement his paltry eighty grand a day?

The government isn't going to go prying through your checkbook or publish your medical records on the Internet. It isn't - as the Liberty Council reported today - going to mandate sex change operations. And it damned sure isn't going to kill Gramma! Right now we suffer at the hands of health care monopolies. We pay big premiums for poor coverage so that some hog like Ed Hanway can eat the best slop and wallow in the finest mud. Medicare is government run health care and it works. Members of Congress have government run health care, and those greedy bastards are happy with it - but they don't want to share that benefit with with the poor schmucks who pay for Congressional health care.

The health care lobby is spending millions of dollars buying Senators and Congressmen, spreading lies as fast as their lobbyists can talk, and slinging shit at anything that moves. They make huge profits and give lousy service - it's a sweet gig - one they do not want to lose!

It's time for all Americans to have access to affordable health care. And it's time for Ed Hanway to get a real job!

6 comments:

Xobekim said...

Meanwhile the President earns $400,000 and the Vice President earns $198,600. Cabinet Members annual salaries are $198,600. Four star flag officers in the Navy, Coast Guard, and Public Health Services Commissioned Corps (the admirals) earn $195,328.44 a year. The overworked and underpaid servants of the public, the rank-and-file members of the House of Representatives and the Senate, earn only $174,000 annually.

While I’d love to lay the culpability for the largess of executive salaries at the feet of the GOP, it took two to tango. Certainly governance under “W” with Republican majorities in both houses, a philosophy of letting loose the hounds of greed, and dismantling the legal safeguards to the economy, like the Glass Stegall Act brought us to this point. Here the chasm between verminous villains like Hanway et al and the balance of society can be seen for what it is. They are the new robber barons and the rest of us are still trying to get along.

Americans need a public option on our healthcare. The exemption from anti-trust litigation carved out for insurance companies needs to be revoked. The States cannot control the menace which insurance companies have become. If we can enforce a minimum wage standard then perhaps we must consider a maximum wage standard as well.

Carla Brown said...

I agree with you guys! Can either of you clarify something for me? I recently visited with folks in one of the college/vocational courses I teach regarding health care. I was astounded to find that most were against Obama's efforts. It seems the overwhelming reason was that most of them were currently unemployed. They believed that if healthcare is reformed and you lose your job, you will be fined between $1 and $5 thousand for not having healthcare. I simply haven't had the time to do the research. I find it hard to believe that could be the case. Any knowledge of this?

Pa Rock said...

More baseless scare tactics. How do you fine someone who is unemployed? August has been set aside by these greedy bastards and their paid shills in Congress for piling scary lie on top of scary lie.

I watched a very surreptitious Republican operative yesterday scare several secretaries with an Internet story that claimed public health care was going to allow the government to snoop through your checking account. This is Amerika. If the government wants to snoop through your check book, it doesn't need health legislation for a cover. George Bush and his salivating jerk-off buddies listened to our telephone calls for years without a legal pretext.

Fining the unemployed sounds like a huge lie. Ask to see their source, and if it turns out to be Drudge or Fox Noise, try not to laugh too loudly!

Xobekim said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Xobekim said...

Hi Carla, I think that originated with the Massachusetts plan which mandates universal coverage and levies a tax on those who fail to comply. This gets down to the nitty gritty of what do you mean by universal and was at the heart of a prolonged campaign debate during the primary between then Senator Clinton and then Senator Obama.

The devil is always in the details.

The problem is there will always be those who do not want health care and as their logic goes: "if I aint takin' why is you taxin'?"
Of course sooner or later one of them ends up in the hospital, thus busting their tightly bound logic.

The barrage of half-truth misinformation is designed to scare folk.

Remember the conversation in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath where the former preacher, Casy, is an ad hoc labor organizer outside a peach plantation in California and Joad went to see what the ruckus at the front gate was all about.

Casy was explaining the going wage and the strike and how when the strike was busted the price would drop to 2.5 cents or lower.

Joad said that folk were getting five cents now. All he and the other migrant workers could see was a meal at the end of the day and little, damn little, hope beyond that.

Well, it seems like your students in that course are like those migrant Okie workers. They got what they got now and they know they didn't have anything yesterday. Tomorrow already scares them, so the fear mongers haven't got far to go in keeping the status quo or making things worse.

Folks gettin' five cents now. Think of it as an economic corollary to what psychologists call the Stockholm Syndrome.

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