alt Hacker NewsBlue Shield of California has 4.5 million plan members, so all of these executive salaries combined add up to 49 cents per member per month. It's not a significant factor in premium costs.
Replies
I think that's highly significant. Keep in mind that that's only one provider in the system. You've also got to pay the executive salaries of your hospital system, your pharmacy chain, your drug company, medical equipment company, etc.
If we figure that every company involved in your $15k/year healthcare cost is paying 0.1-0.5% of their revenue to executive compensation (Cleveland Clinic as a random example pays 0.4% of revenue to the executives, $30 million) then we are talking about a small streaming video subscription worth of cost just which is allocated not on paying a productive group of administrators to keep the lights on, but instead paying excess incentives to an extremely small group of people.
In reality, if CEO compensation was capped to something reasonable like $500,000/year or 10x the pay of the lowest paid employee, there would still be CEOs and the quality of CEOs would not decline because it would still be the highest paid job on the market. Everyone involved in our economy would be just that much richer if the wealth wasn't getting unnecessarily concentrated.
Sweet. Let's charge 49 cents per million dollars of unrealized capital gains per month, it's not significant and less of a burden than 49 cents per month for healthcare.