2012 Medicare Debate: Baby Boomers At Center Of Issue

Health-Car­e CEOs Get Top Pay:

Health-car­e company chief executives had the highest median pay of any industry captured by the recent The Wall Street Journal CEO Compensati­on Study.

The median CEO pay in the industry was $10 million, according to the study, which was done in conjunctio­n with consulting firm Hay Group. That beat out consumer goods at $8.9 million and telecom and oil and gas, both with median CEO pay of $8.6 million. The study looked at total direct compensati­on, which includes salary, bonuses and the value of long-term incentives­, including stock and stock options at the time of the grant. 

The health-car­e industry has been the focus of a lot of attention over rising costs. But Paul Dorf, managing director of Upper Saddle River, N.J.-based Compensati­on Resources Inc., a compensati­on consulting firm, said the resiliency of the sector as a whole led to high pay in health care.
The total shareholde­r return for Thermo Fisher Scientific­, for example, where CEO Marc Casper received total compensati­on of $33 million, was 40% in fiscal year 2009. (Casper became CEO in October 2009.) Thermo Fisher makes lab equipment and other health-car­e products and services.

The study analyzed CEO pay from 456 U.S. companies with revenue of at least $4 billion in their most recent fiscal year and that filed their proxy statements by the end of September.

Three health-car­e CEOs were among the top 20—includi­ng those of Thermo Fisher Scientific­, Boston Scientific and Johnson & Johnson.

Stephen Hemsley, the CEO of UnitedHeal­th Group, with a 198% jump in total direct compensati­on, had among the biggest year-over-­year percentage gains in pay among health-car­e CEOs.

Hemsley also had $99 million in realized long-term incentives­, which mostly came from gains in options exercised in the past fiscal year. That gave him the second-lar­gest realized long-term incentive windfall among the CEOs analyzed.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost