Healthcare CEOs Replace Bankers as America's Highest Paid

image: I want you to know...what a greedy SOB Aetna's CEO is.

I've asserted on these pages before that Obamacare was nothing more than a huge corporate welfare giveaway that did nothing to help reign in health care costs or ensure all Americans have adequate access to affordable medical care. The evidence against Obama's colossal boondoggle just keeps building up:

Pity Wall Street's bankers. Once the highest-paid bosses in the land, they are now also-rans. The real money is in healthcare and drugs, according to the latest survey of executive pay.

There are no bankers in the top 10 of this year's GMI survey of CEO pay. In fact, they have been out since 2007, when Goldman Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfein competed for the top slot with Richard Fuld, boss of soon-to-be-bust Lehman Brothers, and Angelo Morzillo, head of Countrywide, once the largest sub-prime home loan firm.

With the bankers still recovering from their tussle with hubris, old age and infirmity were 2010's boom businesses – at least in terms of pay. Leading the pack was John Hammergren, chief executive of McKesson Corporation. The firm's 52-year-old chairman, chief executive and president took home $145,266,971 in 2010.

McKeeson is probably the biggest company you've never heard of. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company is the largest pharmaceutical distributor in North America, distributing a third of the medicines used in the US. McKeeson's sales topped $112bn last year.

Hammergren's next closest rival was Joel Gemunder, outgoing boss of Omnicare, where he had been president since 1981. Omnicare is a pharmacy company that dispenses drugs in nursing homes – among other services – and had sales of $6.15bn last year. When Gemunder started at the firm it had sales of $150m. His 2010 total pay package was worth $98,283,242.

I think from the statistics above we have pinpointed a very big reason why health care costs are exploding in this country. We couldn't possibly deprive these scumbag CEOs of their solid gold back scratchers, you know. And yet when was the last time you ever heard a conservative opponent of national health care address the insane compensation going to industry CEOs?

The apologists for corporate America, of course, always insist that CEO compensation is fair because of the value they bring to their companies. A notion that yet again has been proven to be absolute bullshit:

Ronald Williams, boss of health insurance giant Aetna, made $57,787,786 in 2010. Another recipient of a golden goodbye, Williams made $50.4m on his stock options last year. Williams is one of the US's most prominent African American business leaders, and has campaigned against healthcare reforms that would have introduced a government-backed public insurance option to compete with private insurers. Since he became CEO, Aetna's stock price declined by 70%.

Wow, greedy and incompetent...and laughing all the way to the bank. Thank goodness we've warded off the "evils" of socialized medicine. Otherwise, some of these assholes might actually have to do real work for a living.