5 ms·

Healthcare executive pay is pretty darn high, more money than any family needs to live comfortably. Keep in mind this is just for Blue Shield California. There

• SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
  Blue 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.
  • dangus 11mo ago
    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.
    • SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
      $500,000 is a lot of money, I don't want to minimize that, but it would not be the highest paid job on the market. There's a number of roles in medicine, law, finance, and nowadays software that pay more for fewer managerial duties. There really isn't much room to argue for cutting executive pay without arguing that it's unimportant to get the best people in executive roles. And that's an argument you can certainly have, but it seems strange to make it a precondition to fixing the healthcare system, when cutting executive pay would resolve only a small fraction of the problem.
      • AngryData 11mo ago
        And all of those things listed requires far more skill set/experience or education to achieve. You would be hard pressed to identify c-suite skills of any established corporation that can't be found in abundance among lower employees if anybody bothered to look instead of doing the 95% networking and politics games that most c-suite are chosen from.
      • dangus 11mo ago
• wmfiv 11mo ago
  BCBS CA revenue is approximately $25B. The total of above is $25.6M. That's 0.1%. You may view those salaries as appropriate for leading companies of this size or immoral and outrageous. But either way executive comp is not the big problem with US healthcare costs.
  • dangus 11mo ago
    $14,570 per person is our healthcare cost per capita. For one thing, cutting out even that tiny 0.1%, that's a savings of $15 a year if I wasn't paying my insurance company's CEO. I would absolutely love to keep that $15. The idea that more than one dollar every single month from every single person is going to the CEOs of all our healthcare services is actually INSANE when you think about it. 0.1% is actually a LOW amount for some entities in the system. For example, the Cleveland Clinic spends 0.4% of revenue on executive compensation: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/340714585 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/340... That really means that out of my $14,570 yearly healthcare cost I could be paying something like $5/month just on executive salary. Who knows, maybe it's even more! This is, again, insane. Why do Cleveland Clinic executives need to be paid $30 million/year? This isn't administrative cost, like all the hard-working people who do the clerical work that keeps these systems operating. This is just the salaries of an extremely small group of people, less than 10 people per company. All of these entities are allowed to make excess profit and/or have loose definitions of non-profit status, and pay CEOs dozens to hundreds of times the salary of their lowest paid employees. There isn't really a limit to the amount they can compensate top executives.
    • systemtest 11mo ago
      > Why do Cleveland Clinic executives need to be paid $30 million/year? So they can hire bodyguards?
  • AngryData 11mo ago
    And? Do they do 30x more work than other companies C-suite? Do they have multiple PhDs or some impossible to find skill that makes them better than other people doing the same job? If such small fractions of money are so inconsequential, why are they nickel and diming all their customers and the healthcare system? It isn't even a secret that these positions are largely based on networking and inter-company politics, not their skills or productivity or often even any real merit. Maybe a couple bucks isn't much to you, but it is to other people. And we haven't even gotten into all the non-cash extras that are often a huge bonus on top of their actual salary. How many more doctors is 25 million dollars could that be providing? How many lives saved?
• quantumwoke 11mo ago
  I think this summary is reductive, because it ignores the surprisingly dense layers of middle management in hospitals and clinics that are paid more than the medical professionals (and even that ignores external middle managers like PBMs etc).
  • dangus 11mo ago
    I’m actually purposefully ignoring the administrative staff because: 1. They do actual, necessary work, and represent a relatively large and reasonably paid workforce (not grossly overpaid like executvies) 2. They fall under a different budget bucket than executive compensation entirely.
• amanaplanacanal 11mo ago
  One thing to note: blue shield of California is a non-profit. So no money is going to shareholders.
  • dangus 11mo ago
    Blue Shield of California failed the duck test and is no longer exempt from paying California taxes. It’s effectively a fake non-profit.
• philipallstar 11mo ago
  There's no point using this issue to gossip about these people's salaries. Their salaries don't scale, and so don't matter. Scaling costs matter.
  • dangus 11mo ago
    This isn’t gossip, it’s publicly disclosed information. Their salaries don’t scale because they’re grossly overpaid. The fact that ~10 people in an organization get paid enough to be a separate line item in a company of 6,500 employees is insane. The executive compensation at Blue Shield of California could employ approximately 300 nurses.
    • philipallstar 11mo ago
      > This isn’t gossip, it’s publicly disclosed information. The gossip part isn't the facts of the matter, it's the deciding how much a business should pay its executives. Their salaries don't scale because there's only one of each of them. It's nothing to do with them being overpaid. Overpaid isn't an objective word. It's just gossipy nonsense. > The executive compensation at Blue Shield of California could employ approximately 300 nurses. I doubt it. Think of all the overhead.
• IncreasePosts 11mo ago
  That's pretty pathetic pay when we have run of the mill employees(ie non-founders) like Sundar and Satya becoming billionaires from their pay packages.
  • dangus 11mo ago
    The fact that we have been conditioned to talk in relative terms like this is sad. Getting paid $10-30 million a year doesn’t become reasonable just because someone else is making $100 million or $1 billion per year. That’s like saying I’m not overweight compared to someone who weighs 600 pounds. Doesn’t change the fact that I’m overweight.
• WarOnPrivacy 11mo ago
  Considering executive outlays apart from shareholder outlays omits most of the parasitic picture. "Top healthcare companies spend 95% of profits on shareholders, study finds" ref: https://www.healthcare-brew.com/stories/2025/02/21/top-healthcare-companies-spend-95-of-profits-on-shareholders-study-finds https://www.healthcare-brew.com/stories/2025/02/21/top-healt... Executives and shareholders are effectively one organism, with execs serving the function of disrupting the host for optimal extraction.