Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: gg cox who wrote (22603)	12/16/2011 12:54:46 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

“The substance of the eminent Socialist gentleman's speech is that making a profit is a sin, but it is my belief that the real sin is taking a loss” Winston Churchill

To: gg cox who wrote (22603)	12/16/2011 1:25:05 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 42652

deleted

To: gg cox who wrote (22603)	12/17/2011 6:00:52 PM
From: Brumar89	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

You really should address whether CEO salaries and corporate profits are very significant to the overall health care industry, which is an enormous industry. I doubt they are.

To: gg cox who wrote (22603)	4/24/2012 11:22:03 AM
From: gg cox	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

April 23rd, 2012 8:18 PM Shareholders raising ruckus about CEO pay By Wendell Potter One of my responsibilities when I was head of corporate communications at Cigna was to help ensure that the company’s annual meeting of shareholders ran smoothly and, if at all possible, attracted no negative publicity. I always dreaded the annual meeting because you really never knew if one or more disgruntled shareholders might show up and ask rude questions of the CEO. But during all of my years of helping plan those meetings, we had an unblemished string of non-events. We considered the meetings marathons if they lasted more than 15 minutes. Most of them were over long before then. Over the course of 10 years, I only recall two reporters who felt compelled to attend, and one of them got stuck in traffic and missed the whole thing. Some of my peers at other health insurers were not that lucky, but relatively few of the big-profit insurers have had to cope with contentious shareholder meetings. It is clear those days are over. Some investors are now beginning to question how those companies make the billions of dollars in profits they report every year, especially with the ranks of the uninsured continuing to swell, how they spend policyholders’ money to influence public policy and whether their CEOs are truly worth all they are being paid. Of the five biggest for-profit insurers, Cigna will lead off the annual meeting season this coming Wednesday in Hartford and it will not likely be the sleeper previous meetings have been. That’s because earlier this month, one big shareholder — the Change to Win (CtW) Investment Group — sent a letter to other shareholders urging them to “send our board a clear message: Cigna’s executive pay structure is broken and open engagement needs to begin with concerned shareholders, immediately.” CtW, which works with pension funds sponsored by several unions, decided to send the letter after seeing that Cigna CEO David Cordani was given a pay raise of more than 25 percent last year, bringing his total compensation to more than $20 million. That was “chiefly on the back of a poorly-utilized performance metric that put cash in (Cordani’s) pocket only because our customers cannot afford to go to the doctor,” CtW said in its letter. Sources within the company have told me that many employees were as upset as CtW to see Cordani get such a huge increase in compensation when most of the rank and file have been lucky to get raises of 2 percent or 3 percent in recent years. CtW is also taking aim at the multimillion-dollar severance packages the company has given to executives who left the company to, as we used to say, “pursue other opportunities” or to “spend more time with their families.” “Over the past three years,” CtW wrote, “(Cigna) has awarded four separate departure packages for executive officers, including several with short tenures.” The letter cited as an example an executive who left in December 2011 with a “departure” package worth almost $4 million, even though he had been in the job for only about 18 months. CtW’s letter and an April 4 Hartford Courant story based on it have inspired health care reform advocates to stage a protest outside of the Bushnell Performing Arts Center during Cigna’s annual meeting, which will begin at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday. Among the protestors likely will be Juan Figueroa, president of the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut. Figueroa noted that Cigna is also a member of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), which he said has testified before the Connecticut legislature on behalf of Cigna and other insurers against a bill that would allow small businesses in Connecticut to buy insurance through the state employee plan. Figueroa and other advocates have also been critical of a huge tax incentive package the state recently awarded Cigna. That package could be worth as much as $71 million if the company increases its workforce in the state over the next 10 years. CtW and Figueroa are also still outraged that Cigna and other insurers gave AHIP $86 million that AHIP in turn funneled to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to finance the Chamber’s 2010 advertising and PR campaign against health care reform. The specific target of the campaign was a proposal that would have permitted the federal government to establish a public insurance option to compete with private insurers. Consumer advocates have also cited the use of policyholders’ premiums being used to fund the Chamber’s campaign as a reason why they are trying to get another big insurer, WellPoint, to disclose all of its corporate political and lobbying expenditures. A coalition of activist investor groups is even demanding the resignation of two WellPoint board members, including Susan Bayh, the wife of former Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., because of “high risk political spending.” Another group of activist investors, led by Dr. Robert Stone, will once again be attending the WellPoint annual meeting next month to encourage other shareholders to support his call for WellPoint’s Blue Cross plans to revert to their nonprofit status. Insurance company CEOs in the past would have dismissed these challenges as mere annoyances, but no longer. Certainly not after Citigroup’s shareholders made front page headlines last week when they voted against the bank’s $15 million pay package for its CEO. If shareholders of Citigroup, which with a market cap of almost $100 billion is more than seven times as big as Cigna, were upset with a $15 million CEO pay package, Cigna’s shareholders just might agree with CtW and Juan Figueroa that David Cordani might not deserve that 25 percent pay hike. michaelmoore.com

To: gg cox who wrote (22603)	3/1/2013 1:01:04 PM
From: John Koligman	Respond to of 42652

By the way, the 'poster child' for CEO pay among healthcare insurers is 'Dollar Bill' McGuire, of United Health... His stats were most impressive... McGuire's payday is a shame, if not a crime Article by: NEAL ST. ANTHONY , Star Tribune Updated: April 21, 2006 - 11:08 PM You could view the conciliatory gesture last week by UnitedHealth Group CEO Bill McGuire to voluntarily forgo any more millions in option grants as a first try at a low-cost settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It may take a lot more than that. The government's top securities regulator is investigating the extent to which McGuire, one of America's best-paid bosses, was able to pick the dates of some of his option grants to coincide with low-water prices for UNH's shares. The company told the Star Tribune this week that the board of directors had to approve the selected dates and that the practice was halted in 2005. Still, some securities lawyers say, such practices may violate securities laws, because they allow insiders to benefit from knowledge not available to other shareholders. "Dollar Bill" has made lots of news with cash-and-stock paydays that have topped $100 million in recent years -- and he's still sitting atop stock options valued at $1.6 billion. McGuire's admiring outside board members -- 10 of whom have become millionaires through the sale of their own appreciated stock in recent years -- have defended his league-leading compensation on grounds that the giant health insurer's stock price has been a superb performer. However, the national scrutiny this week came amid news that the SEC is investigating whether McGuire and the board broke any laws. The Minnesota attorney general also has jumped into a shareholder suit seeking to get to the bottom of the matter. Others are less concerned with option-dating and more concerned with the cumulative effects that big paydays for executives at UnitedHealth are having on the health care industry. "My thoughts relate more to UnitedHealth Group's pay in general, rather than on the backdating issues, which are hard to parse due to ambiguous legal standards," said Broc Romanek, a former SEC lawyer, corporate counsel and the editor of TheCorporateCounsel.net and CompensationStandards.com. "UnitedHealth Group's CEO serves as a good example of excessive CEO pay being the fault of an aggressive CEO and a compliant board, which impacted the pay structure of an entire industry," Romenek said. In the managed-care sector, Romanek said, CEOs at Cigna HealthCare, Aetna and WellPoint "have been historically overpaid because they used McGuire as their peer group for benchmarking purposes. Clearly, UnitedHealth is another one of those poster children for bad corporate governance, even without the backdating scandal. All of these serve as a reminder as to how much the CEO pay-setting process is broken." McGuire, a physician, has led once-reeling United through 15 years of unprecedented growth and profits, particularly over the past eight years. UNH grew through consolidation of national competitors and as a seller of innovative programs and back-office processing to other health insurers trying to contain costs. Now one of America's best-known billionaires, thanks to appearances this week on national TV and in the Wall Street Journal, McGuire said he believed that everything he and several other top executives and board members did was acceptable and within United's corporate rules. Several board members publicly praised McGuire's leadership and vision and said he was more than entitled to a piece of the additional tens of billions of market value added under his tenure. Still, investors appear concerned. Despite posting more record quarterly results this week, UNH shares are down so far in 2006, and off more than 20 percent from their high of 2005. Institutional Shareholder Services, the influential shareholder advisory group, said in a prepared statement Thursday that there "is not sufficient evidence to prove backdating of options by the company." Still, ISS said, it's concerned that the board's compensation committee has failed in its duty to "provide oversight to the executive pay practices and administered a flawed employment contract. The over $1 billion that Dr. McGuire currently holds in paper gains shows that the committee has not applied the 'holy cow' test, as fiduciary duty requires." In other words, this may be legal, but "holy cow." McGuire and his executive crew have set new standards for wealth that have drawn envy as well as ire from country clubs and executive suites nationally. Then there is the wrath of those who see such largesse as simply too much -- particularly from a health care outfit, because there are so many millions of Americans who lack basic health insurance. "Even if there's nothing illegal at United, this is the extreme of obscenity in corporate governance," said Brother Louis DeThomasis, the chancellor of St. Mary's University, a onetime successful entrepreneur and a veteran board member who writes and lectures about business ethics. "We must reward excellence in performance. But handing people eternal paradise ... $1.6 billion worth of options is a bit much."