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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (8173)	8/11/2009 9:52:08 PM
From: John Koligman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Lane, I guess those profits the insurance companies do 'eke' out must go to the top... Regards, John <ng> CEO Compensation: Who Said Health Care is in a Financial Crisis? Those of you who are struggling to pay for your generic medicines or wondering why the doctor is charging you a $5.00 co-pay, give some thought to these facts about how our health care dollars are allocated. At the end of this post, there is a list of 23 health companies I found on Forbes.com, what the CEO was paid in 2005, and the average paid to the CEO in the past five years. Imagine adding vice presidents, Board of Directors, stock holders and the other 200-300 other companies all cashing in on your health to that total at the bottom. Based on this, the next time you want to argue with your Primary Care doctor's front desk about a $5.00 co-pay, remember that he makes an average of $149,000.00 per year. On the other hand -- using United Healthcare as an example -- your insurance company paid their CEO -- one man -- $324,000,000 over a recent five year period. If you are uninsured, try calling any one of these 23 CEOs and see if they will give you free insurance. BTW: 10% of 14.9 billion is 1.4 billion. If basic insurance costs $8,000/year for a family then taking 10% from just these CEO salaries would insure 35,000 Americans a year for five years. That is a lot of people that can be helped just by 23 men. Looking at the companies as a whole that profit from health care, we can probably pay for every uninsured person in this country for decades to come. The numbers are numbing, which is why we should do something about this. United Health Group CEO: William W McGuire 2005: 124.8 mil 5-year: 342 mil Forest Labs CEO: Howard Solomon 2005: 92.1 mil 5-year: 295 mil Caremark Rx CEO: Edwin M Crawford 2005: 77.9 mil 5-year: 93.6 mil Abbott Lab CEO: Miles White 2005: 26.2 mil 5-year: 25.8 mil Aetna CEO: John Rowe 2005: 22.1 mil 5-year:57.8 mil Amgen CEO: Kevin Sharer 2005:5.7 mil 5-year:59.5 mil Bectin-Dickinson CEO: Edwin Ludwig 2005: 10 mil 5-year:18 mil Boston Scientific CEO: 2005:38.1 mil 5-year:45 mil Cardinal Health CEO: James Tobin 2005:1.1 mil 5-year:33.5 mil Cigna CEO: H. Edward Hanway 2005:13.3 mil 5-year:62.8 mil Genzyme CEO: Henri Termeer 2005: 19 mil 5-year:60.7 mil Humana CEO: Michael McAllister 2005:2.3 mil 5-year:12.9 mil Johnson & Johnson CEO: William Weldon 2005:6.1 mil 5-year:19.7 mil Laboratory Corp America CEO: Thomas MacMahon 2005:7.9 mil 5-year:41.8 mil Eli Lilly CEO: Sidney Taurel 2005:7.2 mil 5-year:37.9 mil McKesson CEO: John Hammergen 2005: 13.4 mil 5-year:31.2 mil Medtronic CEO: Arthur Collins 2005: 4.7 mil 5-year:39 mil Merck Raymond Gilmartin CEO: 2005: 37.8 mil 5-year:49.6 mil PacifiCare Health CEO: Howard Phanstiel 2005: 3.4 mil 5-year: 8.5 mil Pfizer CEO: Henry McKinnell 2005: 14 mil 5-year: 74 mil Well Choice CEO: Michael Stocker 2005: 3.2 mil 5-year: 10.7 mil WellPoint CEO: Larry Glasscock 2005: 23 mil 5-year: 46.8 mil Wyeth CEO: Robert Essner 2005:6.5 mil 5-year: 28.9 mil TOTAL 2005: 559.8 mil TOTAL 5-Year: 14.9 billion

To: Lane3 who wrote (8173)	8/12/2009 10:42:08 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Of course they're trying to maintain their profits. Do you blame them for that? It is not disreputable for a company to try to maintain its profits. Not disreputable at all. But they don't seem to have a vested interest in lowering health care costs. Since when is it the job of insurance companies to reduce health care costs? Why are you putting that burden on them. That's the problem... in our 'free market' health care system NOBODY is looking to reducing health care costs. Not the providers... that would be cutting their own compensation. In a free market, the one that usually puts pressure on the seller to lower costs and become more efficient is the person paying the bill. As for more services being added, how old are you? Do you not remember when mental health services were not included? Or chiropractors? Or fertility treatments? Lots of stuff has been added over the years. There are states that require all policies to have such things. I remember when health insurance covered only what was known as "major medical." Now when you check into the hospital they give you socks. They used to cost extra if they were available at all. You've somehow managed to miss the trend line here. Maybe in the last couple of years there has been a dip in the trend line but the overall trend line is the inclusion of more and more services. I'm old... 60. And yes the long term trend has been more extensive policies. But I would guess that that trend has been permanently broken. Huh? They're the same thing. More of us are old. The average age is older. The gross is older and so is the per capita. The total cost of health care is going to go up because of demographics... can't fight that (without the fictitious "Obama death squads"). We need to lower the cost of treatments and end the medical inflationary cycle. You don't agree? Of course they didn't stop it. They slowed it some, but they did not stop it. It wasn't their job to stop it but you keep blaming them for not stopping it. Yet you have no suggestions on how they could have stopped it. The reason I keep asking for ways they could have stopped it is that I don't believe it is feasible for them to stop it and you can hardly blame anyone for doing something that isn't feasible. So either offer something that they feasibly could do or could have done or quit blaming them. It's illogical and unfair scapegoating. It's not scapegoating... it's the system. None of the players in the current system has a vested interest in reducing costs. I'm glad to see that you understand how it came about. Had we all been doing our own individual thing all along we wouldn't be in this mess. The problem was triggered by employers offering health care benefits and competing among themselves to offer primo packages. We would be better off had that not happened. Agreed. It's true that there are fewer companies than before and less competition but there are still enough that they have to compete on price. Then why isn't that driving cost... as it would in other markets? I do. I heartily agree. Just disagree that the proposal will produce that result. Which proposal? They could be part of one potential solution. If we could remove the employers from the equation and free insurance companies to offer a full range of products to individuals, there's opportunity there to reverse the damage. They could offer both prepaid health care plans, what we now call health insurance, and actual insurance products, which would be relatively inexpensive. That approach is hardly a slam dunk--we may be too far down the entitlement road to destruction... That would be the ideal solution. But you would have to outlaw (or at least grievously tax) employer paid health benefits. That's not going to happen... you think the town meetings are tough now, try taking away every body's insurance. That's what I'm trying to enable by discussing the topic with you. I'm trying to enlighten and I'm willing to be enlightened but I will not compromise nor would I want you to. Well then you will never be happy, because the health bill that finally gets passed will not reflect exactly what you want, nor what I want.