Commonwealth Fund research cited in analysis of America's rising healthcare costs...
In 2014, Stephen Hemsley, CEO of the health insurance company UnitedHealth Group, reportedly took home more than $66 million in salary, stock options and other forms of compensation. If that paycheck seems handsome, it wasn’t. At least, not when you compare it to Hemsley’s total pay five years earlier, when it amounted to $102 million.
Executives at health care companies in the United States had the highest median CEO pay of any industry in 2014, according to an analysis by the Associated Press/Equilar released Tuesday. Yet whatever the supposed benefits of higher CEO pay are -- more efficient management, better health care -- they are not trickling down to ordinary Americans, who want better, more affordable medical care. In fact, analysts noted that these outsized paychecks, not just for CEOs but also for other managers in the health care industry, are in fact serving to drive up the costs of health care.