The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age - New York Times

The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age - New York Times:

"The new tycoons oppose raising taxes on their fortunes. Unlike Mr. Crandall, neither Mr. Weill nor Mr. Griffin nor most of the dozen others who were interviewed favor tax rates higher than they are today, although a few would go along with a return to the levels of the Clinton administration. The marginal tax on income then was 39.6 percent, and on capital gains, 20 percent. That was still far below the 70 percent and 39 percent in the late 1970s. Those top rates, in the Bush years, are now 35 percent and 15 percent, respectively.

“The income distribution has to stand,” Mr. Griffin said, adding that by trying to alter it with a more progressive income tax, “you end up in problematic circumstances. In the current world, there will be people who will move from one tax area to another. I am proud to be an American. But if the tax became too high, as a matter of principle I would not be working this hard.”"

Yes, I know I will NOT drag my ass out of bed for less than 100 Large a day!
[Mr. Griffin made a billion dollars last year.]

This is an astounding article, however and well worth the read. One more bit:

In contrast to many of his peers in corporate America, Mr. Sinegal, 70, the Costco chief executive, argues that the nation’s business leaders would exercise their “unique skills” just as vigorously for “$10 million instead of $200 million, if that were the standard.”

As a co-founder of Costco, which now has 132,000 employees, Mr. Sinegal still holds $150 million in company stock. He is certainly wealthy. But he distinguishes between a founder’s wealth and the current practice of paying a chief executive’s salary in stock options that balloon into enormous amounts. His own salary as chief executive was $349,000 last year, incredibly modest by current standards.

“I think that most of the people running companies today are motivated and pay is a small portion of the motivation,” Mr. Sinegal said. So why so much pressure for ever higher pay?

“Because everyone else is getting it,” he said. “It is as simple as that. If somehow a proclamation were made that C.E.O.’s could only make a maximum of $300,000 a year, you would not have any shortage of very qualified men and women seeking the jobs.”

Cheers,

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Health Net ordered to pay $9 million after canceling cancer patient's policy - Los Angeles Times

Health Net ordered to pay $9 million after canceling cancer patient's policy - Los Angeles Times:

"Calling Woodland Hills-based Health Net's actions 'egregious,' Judge Sam Cianchetti, a retired Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, ruled that the company broke state laws and acted in bad faith.

'Health Net was primarily concerned with and considered its own financial interests and gave little, if any, consideration and concern for the interests of the insured,' Cianchetti wrote in a 21-page ruling.

Patsy Bates, a 52-year-old grandmother, was at work at the Gardena hair salon she owns when her lawyer William Shernoff called with the news. Bates said she screamed and thanked the lawyer.

Then, 'I thanked God,' she said. 'I praised the Lord.'

Bates called the arbitration judge 'an angel . . . a real stand-up kind of judge.'

When Health Net dropped her in January 2004, Bates was stuck with more than $129,000 in medical bills and was forced to stop chemotherapy for several months until she found a charity to pay for it.

Health Net Chief Executive Jay Gellert ordered an immediate halt to cancellations and told The Times that the company would be changing its coverage applications and retraining its sales force.

At the arbitration hearing, internal company documents were disclosed showing that Health Net had paid employee bonuses for meeting a cancellation quota and for the amount of money saved."It's difficult to imagine a policy more reprehensible than tying bonuses to encourage the rescission of health insurance that keeps the public well and alive," the judge wrote."

Of course, this will get reduced substantially on appeal, but at least this tort case got the attention of the insurer to improve policy (for the time being, anyway).

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Politics | What Sicko doesn't tell you ...

Politics What Sicko doesn't tell you ...

Local people from Portsmouth to Scarborough have been protesting against ISTCs draining scarce NHS funds, which has led to service closures and staff redundancies to balance the books. There is not an area of the country where services are not being cut and closed. Protests against the closures of accident and emergency departments and hospital services are happening in Surrey, East and West Sussex, Kent, Worcester, Manchester, Leeds, Durham and Huddersfield; and against the 150 community hospitals in places such as Norfolk, Cambridge, Leicester, Devon, Marlborough and Bromley. The NHS, the government says, has had unprecedented levels of funding - so where has all the money gone if it isn't into services? Is it really all down to bad managers and greedy doctors and nurses?

All markets need systems for pricing, billing and invoicing. Labour has introduced those: the electronic patient record, part of the £1bn IT disaster. The NHS too is being transformed from within. Foundation trusts such as University College London Hospitals Trust have been given new powers to enter joint ventures with commercial companies such as the Hospital Corporation of America and to spend millions of pounds on advertising campaigns, PR agents, mega-departments of finance and accounting, press officers, management consultants and profits. As in the US, billions of pounds, probably approaching 20% of annual NHS funds - estimated to be £20bn in England in a year - are being squandered on what are called the transaction costs of the market.

Earlier this year the US chief executive officer of UnitedHealth, Bill McGuire, was sacked along with other board members for repricing share options. His annual $126m package was not enough for him. Meanwhile more than 50 million Americans, including 10 million children, go without care - in the richest country in the world. Is this what we want?

· Allyson Pollock is author of NHS plc: The Privatisation of Our Healthcare and professor and head of the centre for international public health policy at the University of Edinburgh.

Interesting piece about how greed and capitalism are not turning out to be the cure for the NHS. And, on the other hand, how the NHS needs some serious work, making the case for Medicare for all all the stronger.

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I do not think it means what you think it means...

Was Adam Smith really a promoter of greed?




An excellent book chapter giving a more complete picture of Adam Smith's economic and moral philosophy that is not as conservatives would have you believe. Greed is not good. Laissez-Faire is not absolute.

"In reality, as Adam Smith argued, one of the main functions of government, beyond that of securing the order that allows markets to operate effectively, is that of intervening to ensure that the unwarranted excesses of commercial society do not entirely destroy the social order or the moral foundations of behaviour. As we have seen in his arguments regarding the role of publicly funded education in redressing the worst of the degrading and demoralising effects of the division of labour and reducing the possibility of revolutionary protests against an unjust social order, Smith argued that in effect ‘…the visible hand of the state would counteract the potentially stultifying effects of the invisible hand of the market’ "

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