Before We Cry for UnitedHealth
I understand that no insurance company should be compelled to stay in the exchange if they are losing money but I do want to point out one thing:
Stephen Hemsley, CEO of UnitedHealth Group Inc.
Total compensation: $66,125,208 for the year ended Dec. 31, 2014
Salary: $1,300,000
Non-equity incentive pay: $3,949,000
Other compensation: $107,479
Exercised stock options: $45,569,049
Value realized on vesting shares: $15,199,680
New stock options: 83,918
Total 2014 shareholder return: 36.5 percent
Don’t you just feel for the struggles of this guy?
Nope, not crying for United or that guy.
Crying for the millions of middle and lower class Americans who have been royally screwed by the ACA and this whole big mess.
Nothing can convince me that any insurance company in history ever lost or loses money. They just pass on their expenses (like paying out claims for their customers!) to everybody else’s premiums. And when did we last see a CEO forgo his salary or stock options if things got tough, like I had to do for several months during the crash of 2009-2010 before I unloaded my practice on a hospital? I’m still paying back the money I borrowed against a whole-life policy mostly to meet the staff payroll needs first…all because we were being grossly underpaid and stretch-paid by damned insurance companies.
What he also isn’t talking about is the $6.5 BILLION PROFIT that United posted for the first half of 2015. Obscene !
I’m printing this article out and posting it in my clinic. There are SO many able-bodied 20somethings who’ve been looking for jobs for nearly a year – consider what they could achieve if they applied themselves!?
Seriously – if a crack comes out between the generations, and the under thirties decide they’ve been screwed (true), and blame the Boomers and postBoomers (reasonable) ol’ Billy Hell might break loose. I recall when something like this happened in Europe, and Silly Mustache Man came to power.
but… His predecessor received ONE BILLION in compensation. He was a pulmonologist who left medicine to work for a new HMO because medicine was too much work
.. So he feels underpaid