This story is reported by the AP and I can already hear the talking points.
Granted $6.5 million is an incredible amount of money for one man to make in a year, but look at this in the context of “controlling health care costs.”
Michael McCallister’s salary is approximately 0.00021 of premium or 0.021%. By cutting Mr. McCallister’s salary to ZERO, a family paying $500/month for healthcare would see their premium reduced by 10 cents/month.
By contrast, assuming that premium tax is 2%, Humana paid about $600 million in premium taxes. Further, Humana paid $562 million in federal income taxes (up 62.6% in 2009 v 08). These two taxes are 179 times more than what McCallister made. (It’s actually more money than Humana’s stockholders made too.)
I’ll be waiting to hear about how Federal and State taxes are driving up the cost of Health Care!
Cas, because we “keep the good people” Krooks!
we’ve been hearing this BS for years,” we have to pay to keep good people”,i wonder why this country is in such a mess then.
This a a great response for the Health Care CEO’s when they are in front of Congress. In regards to the last comment by Dan. I find it very interesting how our President can say that he is overpaying the Health Insurers for Medicare Advantage when the Government actually outsources it Medicare administrative services to Highmark for PA, NJ, and WV. Doesn’t the Government pay Highmark to process the Medicare claims, and the couple of percentage points over medicare paid to the Insurance Companies is for the administration of the claims? I wonder how much Medicare outsources it claims adjudication on a national basis? By the way, aren’t the Insurance companies better at controlling costs of Medicare than the Federal Government?
And we get our #@%& rates for Med Advantage cut. There’s a lot to be said about Humana BUT I’ll keep it to myself.