I just moved to California and I’m trying to find health insurance for our family here on th west coast. I couldn’t believe the cost of the premiums from all of the different insurance companies. Now I’m hearing that in California insurance rates will also be raised on Oct. 1st. Is there a way of finding out who are the heads of these insurance companies and how much they make each year?
I used to work in the industry. Which one(s) do you want to know about? It should be available on the web.
I don’t want to read too much into your question but you may starting to make a common mistake. There are some very rich people in the health insurance industry but that isn’t where most of the costs are coming from. The whole system is inefficient, people are living longer requiring more expensive care, and the R&D costs for cutting edge treatments are astronomical. Medical science has started to outstrip people’s abilities to pay for the things that can be done to prolong the quality and length of their lives. Taking out CEO and executive pay for the health insurance industry alone won’t make a meaningful difference to your premiums. That is only a tiny part of it. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies do as well plus every step down the chain. Health insurance companies tend to turn a decent profit but it is only on the order of a few percent a year based on huge cash outlays and large risk.
Addressing some of those problems was what the recent health insurance bill was supposed to accomplish but it is a very complex problem.
Health insurance companies always raise rates in a down economy. Benefits are not paid from premiums that are collected, they are paid from the profits on the investment of those premiums. When investments shrink, they have to raise rates to cover benefits. It’s a great business model in good times, but it sucks in a recession, and health insurance companies are sucking wind right now.
You might want to remember that the head of every single large company of whatever kind makes lots of money. Insurance is exactly like every other industry in America.
The Securities and Exchange Commission requires every corporation to report the five largest wage earners in any company and what they make. You can search there for what you want.
For equivalent coverage? I know California requires coverage of Birth Control but I’m sure there’s probably more requirements they must abide by.
It’s pretty unimportant what they make; CEO salaries – even highly inflated ones – are a tiny, little, itty, bitty percentage of revenue, and still a very small percentage of the net. By my standards, sure, most CEO’s are pretty damned rich, but the CEO isn’t the owner of the company; the stockholders are. That’s you, me, your pension plan, our 401(k) funds, and a heck of a lot of other people and investors.
Yes there is.
[ul]
[li]Fortune 500’s list of the top Health Care Insurance and Managed Care companies.[/li]
[li]List of CEO salaries for 2009 (2010 have not been reported yet). Click on “Insurance Carriers” for a full list, but beware this includes many non-health insurance companies.[/li][/ul]
Merging those two yields the following data for CEOs of the biggest health insurance companies.
Rank Company CEO 2009 Salary
#21 UNITEDHEALTH GROUP Stephen J. Hemsley 8,901,916
#31 WELLPOINT Angela F. Braly 13,108,198
#63 AETNA Ronald A. Williams 18,058,162
#73 HUMANA Michael B. McCallister 6,509,452
#129 CIGNA H. Edward Hanway 18,818,467
#146 HEALTH NET Jay M. Gellert 3,643,342
#168 WELLCARE HEALTH PLANS Heath Schiesser 8,077,718
#328 AMERIGROUP James G. Carlson 5,232,249
#425 UNIVERSAL AMERICAN Richard A. Barasch 3,503,701
#486 CENTENE CORP Michael F. Neidorff 6,077,900
And, BOOM! There’s a factual answer for the OP. To offer some context, the average salary for a CEO of a S&P 500 company is $ 9,830,293, and 70% of these guys and gals are actually below that.
But as others have said, sidestepping your actual question to get to the larger issue, CEO salaries have absolutely nothing to do with the rising costs of health insurance.
The basic problem with health insurance is that typically, the person consuming the service does not pay. (Until recently) It was paid by the employer, and the employee and family consumed the service. Hence, no incentive to make it less expensive. Employers just raise their prices and pay what they are told to pay. Unfortunately, in bad times the treadmill starts to grind to a halt or the bankruptcy courts halts it for employers. Until recently, even shopping around was a hazard when switching insurers might trigger “pre-existing condition” clauses.
Everyone in the health business sees the river of money flowing by and determines to raise their prices if they can, to get their fair share. For example, doctors - what makes a brain surgeon worth $1M+ a year? Although, I certainly think a brain surgeon deserves a big salary before a CEO.
Plus, the peopel who have money are paying for the people who don’t. I see a lot of comments about the $10 aspirins and $200 “supplies” being charged in order to pay for people who have no insurance, or Medicare patients whose reimbursements don’t cover the full cost.
Big executive perks
7 years ago I dated an attorney who was the Chief Privacy Officer for a major insurance company. She had been a lawyer, and rose up the ranks to the executive level.
I never knew her salary, and whatever it was, she earned it. Divorced, supporting a daughter in college and another daughter in high school. She worked hard, and seemed very competent professionally, and she drove a Mercedes.
I was comfortable with all of that.
BUT, she told me about the health plan she had.
At the corporate headquarters, for the executives, they had a PHYSICIAN ON-CALL.
Any illness, just call the company doc!
The on-call doc pissed me off. Not available for the thousands of workers at the headquarters, just the executives.
I have been paying an exorbitant amount for my own private health insurance for the last 13 years.
David
It’s not just the health insurances companies making money. The entire health care industry is dependent on the money provided by the health insurance system. I know several people who became rich from supplying health care companies with software and hardware. Drug companies, testing labs, personnel providers, waste disposal companies, and any business associated with the industry has the opportunity to make heaps of money.
if this is all happening in California, that means the health insurance companies need to be willing and able to pay the prices that is charged by doctors and hospitals in California. So, to me, the really interesting question is, what sort of prices do Californian hospitals charge and how does that compare to prices elsewhere? With the biggest immigrant population of all states, one can imagine how much of a “strength” this “diversity” is to the hospital finances over there if their emergency rooms have to keep paying American medical expenses for people with Mexican ability to pay (if even that).
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I would (playing devil’s advocate) argue that they’re entitled - even though I’m jealous of them. Think of the President of the US - he gets a personal physician that we pay for, and anything short of a Kennedy incident is survivable. Rank has its privileges, but the higher the rank, the more biz-critical the individual (theoretically). A CEO with the flu who can’t perform critical functions will cost the business money; if the business becomes less than viable because the captain is less than viable, it fails - and so does your insurance, due to the previously mentioned bankruptcy thing.
That said, I’d still like to have CEO perks… it’s just that they can get by without me.
“The basic problem with health insurance is that typically, the person consuming the service does not pay.”
This can contribute to the problem but is not a problem by itself. For example, service-connected veterans get, these days by and large, very good medical at no cost to them but the cost to the taxpayer remains reasonable. This is largelly because VA docs have no financial incentive to jack up costs and because they can can say “no” to veterans who ask for wasteful spending.
A bigger problem than excessive demand for services by insured persons, or excessive executive salaries, or expensive advances in medical care is the problem of perverse incentives. An outstanding piece on “The Cost Conundrum” (why more expensive care is not better care) was written by Boston surgeon Atul Gawande and appeared in the New Yorker last June. It is available free at The Cost Conundrum | The New Yorker
[quote=“GiantRat, post:12, topic:554834”]
Actually, my first thought was - what is the “fair market value” of that plan and is that number tacked onto their taxable income as a benefit? (Does the cost of a ludicrously generous health plan become a taxable benefit in the USA?)
The standard “trick” in any pay plan is to give the employee benefits that don’t qualify as taxable income. That way it’s cheaper than paying them cash. Conversely, when a benefit is taxable, it may be cheaper to just give the employee cash and let them opt to pay for what they want.
The early 2008 Democratic campaigns talked about health care reform. At some point, the either during the campaign or after the election, Obama and Democratic house leaders switched from talking about health care reform to health insurance reform. I suspect the change happened because polling found that going after insurance providers polled better than talking about changing the way doctors and hospitals provide service.
This makes sense politically. Who likes their health insurance company? Lots of people like their personal physician/clinic.
Medical insurance is almost a commodity business. Like commodity companies, profit as a percent of sales is low. What happens in the Great Debates forum is that someone will provide a cite for health insurance companies making typically or on average 5%. Someone else will dispute it by citing that Wellpoint (I believe) had a year in which they made almost 30% profit.
Even if we take the single data point over the data and extrapolate that to the entire industry and say medical insurance collectively makes 30% profit, that isn’t the real problem with prices.
If we have 8% increases per year in healthcare/insurance (which I don’t think are too far out of line from what we’ve been seeing), the savings from eliminating the 30% profit would last about 3 years until we’re back to current prices still increasing. (Also, if profits were making a big difference in costs, insurance from non-profit insurance companies should be lower than for-profit, but they aren’t significantly.)
There are competing studies which point out and then minimize the financial effects of areas: defensive medicine, lawsuits, etc. (For example, some study group says a decrease in defensive testing would only decrease costs by 2%.) So those may not be substantial increasers of cost.
One thing that seems hardly talked about, yet would seem to have a huge effect, is that doctors earn about 2x what they do in Europe. Doctors (at least the highest paid ones) are getting rich off of the business.
Stop! You’re both wrong! (Er … both right? 
)
Balthisar is correct that whacking off the heads of a few insurance companies is not the solution to high health care cost. But “tiny, little, itty, bitty percentage” is such a gross misstatement one suspects he’s never bothered to actually examine fact. My Google-fu is poor and I had to spend some minutes just to find Table 6: Distribution of income in the United States, 1982-2006
(BTW, I do realize that “Top 1 percent of American earners” and “insurance company CEO’s” are not synonyms. As I suggest, my Google-fu is too poor to waste time confirming the obvious.)
This is the Very Very key point, seldom acknowledged even on this erudite message board. (Instead we hear questions from Doper consumers of health service asking, in effect, how to avoid paying!)
Very very often the best way to understand economics is to forget everything you know about financial instruments and just pretend we’re all castaway on some island trying to organize our industries. You’ve decided you need 20 people for health care. Do you think it would be most efficient to tell 5 of them to find a corner somewhere and do paperwork? Paperwork that often has the effect of doing unnecessary treatments and not doing necessary treatments?
Oh, I wasn’t stating whether they were a tiny percentage of the population, or among the top 1% of wage earners, or whatever. I meant that their salaries are a tiny percentage of their companies revenue. Kind of like, my salary is an even tinier percentage of my company’s revenue. For example, company brings in $100, has payouts of $40, expenses of $5, dividend payments of $5, that CEO isn’t making that other $50 for himself.
Sorry for quibbling. I like to work with precise numeric values. Your new “tiny percentage” is about right. Your previous “tiny, little, itty, bitty percentage” was more than an itty-bitty bit exaggerated. 
Well, it’s certainly subjective whether something is “tiny” or “tiny, little, itty, bitty.”
But here are some (relatively) precise numbers:
United Health Group had gross revenues of about $90 billion in 2009. There CEO made $8.9 million. That means his salary was equal to approximately 0.0099% of revenue, or just under 1% of 1%.
If 1% is tiny, than it’s at least “tiny, tiny” if not “itty, bitty” 
Revenue pulled from here: UnitedHealth Group Incorporated (UNH) Valuation Measures & Financial Statistics
Salary based on previous post by anson.
ETA: that means that if his salary was cut in half, they could reduce everyone’s bill by one half of 1% of 1%. Yay.
You want to do numbers? Let’s do them. You picked UnitedHealth Group? Fine.
From Wikipedia we find that in 2006 their CEO stepped down:
That’s billion with a b. (Some of that will be forfeited due to a lawsuit.)
The billion dollar parachute wasn’t needed to compensate Dr. McGuire for earlier stinginess:
In 2007, UNH profit was 3 billion on revenue of 85 billion or so; disclosed compensation for top 5 executives was 34 million. Note that others than the top 5 may also have had high compensation. Note moreover that option-reporting can be deceptive: In 2010, for example UNH’s CEO redeemed stock options with a value of $98.58 million, far more than shows up in a typical compensation report. (UnitedHealth Group Incorporated (UNH) Company Profile & Facts - Yahoo Finance )
To save you any trip to a calculater, and since fuzzy descriptions are good enough, we’re talking about “a rather bloody large amount of money.” The 2006 single-man parachute alone represented more than 1% of every premium UNH collected that year.
Would cutting one such salary have a big effect on health care costs? Of course not, and I never said otherwise.
But a billion-dollar parachute here, and 98-million dollar stock-option there, and after a while we are talking about real money.