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Privacy? Is this a thing of the past?
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Anonymous
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http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/waxmanletter20090818.pdf
So Congress is demanding that health insurance companies identify by name all individuals who earned $500K or more in the last 5 years. Is this legal? Don't the companies have the obligation to keep the compensation details of individual employees (not officers) private? If as a insurance company employee I landed a huge corporate account and received a significant bonus that year should my name and compensation details be splashed all over the world? (Don't tell me they will keep it quiet - some intern will leak the list inevitably.) IRS cannot give this information to Congress - why does Congress think they can get around their own laws and intimidate the insurance companies to give up what they cannot get from another govt. agency due to privacy protections Congress themselves enacted? |
Anonymous
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It depends. If they are public, the senior executives' compensation is a part of the public record. Aside from that, I don't know whether they have the legal right to get the rest if they want it. That said, it seems pretty bad that they are asking for it.
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Anonymous
Do you mean Congress looks bad or that the insurance companies look bad? I think the idea is that congress wants the insurance companies to look bad - sort of like being asked the question "Mr. Smith, when did you stop beating your wife?" Maybe they can send the same demands to the top 20 medical malpractice law firms? |
Anonymous
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The idea of this is truly scary and if a GOP congressman had sent this letter the ACLU and its philosophical kind would have been all over this.
What business is if of Congressman Waxman how much I earn, or how much you earn? Are we criminalizing success in this country now? We are not talking about senior executive or officers compensation, but about any employee of the insurance company who succeeded and was well compensated for it in the last 5 years. From the Wiki definition of fascism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#Economic_policies |
Anonymous
Oh, they'll make the insurance companies look bad, but it will be a smear effort. To me, Congress looks bad for doing it. Congress is making a dishonest argument. Executive compensation is not the reason that health care cost is out of control. It is not even a rounding error on the cost chain of an insurance company. But they know that joe six-pack is going to say "those fat cats are taking my premiums and building their pools with it". Congress knows this and they want to exploit the pressure even though they know it is a false argument. You will never see Waxman ask doctors to disclose whether their salary is above or below that same amount. Wonder why... It's also hypocritical. Each of these men and women in Congress will go on to make $1M + salaries after they retire from politics. Most of them will do it by lobbying on behalf of one or another interest. A few will make it in other ways. What makes their salary morally correct and health care salaries morally wrong? We can't expect to have functioning industries if we go on witch hunts over compensation. It's one thing to want to reform compensation when the government is bailing a company out. It's another to try to force salaries down because the public at large is jealous of what they make. And no, I'm not in any way affiliated with the insurance business. |