Jaw-dropping pay package for McKesson's CEO

John Hammergren makes so much money that his company, McKesson, pays him an extra <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/02/he-s-one-of-the-nation-s-highest-paid-ceos-and-you-ve-never-heard-of-him.html" rel="nofollow">$17,000 for a financial planner</a> to count it all.<br /><br />McKesson workers don't earn enough to afford health care.<br /><br />Hammergren, McKesson's CEO, will be paid $51.7 million, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/ceos-who-get-paid-much-more-than-workers-2013-3?op=1" rel="nofollow">over 847 times what the average worker at his company makes</a>. And even <a href="http://www.cwhonors.org/archives/histories/Hammergren.pdf">he admitted that McKesson workers can’t afford the essentials</a>: <br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">What’s great about the position of McKesson today as the world’s largest health care services company, our footprint is everywhere. We have systems in probably 50 or 60 percent of the hospitals in America. We have over a third of the pharmacies in America and we have systems in probably 90 percent of the payers in America.<br /><br />At the same time we can have a significant impact on the cost of providing the care. In fact, we have McKesson employees who can’t even afford… the 20 percent co-pay that’s required to have our insurance inside of McKesson. Those people should be afforded high quality health care, and should be provided it in a way that is cost effective.</blockquote>That interview was from 2004. Eight years later, the largest healthcare company in the country still doesn’t provide an affordable healthcare plan for employees. Exactly nothing has changed. Well, except the size of Hammergren’s pension. (Hint: <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-06/jumbo-severance-packages-for-top-ceos-are-growing">it definitely didn’t go down</a>). <br /><br />And it’s not because his company is doing great either. <br /><br />McKesson settled out of court <a href="http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/April/12-civ-539.html">for almost $200 million last year after being prosecuted for Medicaid fraud</a> by the Department of Justice. <br /><br />McKesson made $1.2 billion in 2011. Hammergren took 11 percent of that total home. <br /><br />The worst part is that he isn’t alone.<br /><div><br /><div><a href="http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive-excess-2013">Yet another study</a> shows the pay gap between the people who actually do the company’s work and the CEOs who collect the profit.<br /><br />Last year, <a href="http://www.aflcio.org/Corporate-Watch/CEO-Pay-and-You/CEO-to-Worker-Pay-Gap-in-the-United-States">the average CEO was paid 354 times as much as the average worker</a>. They now make 873 percent more than they were paid (including long-term incentives and other perks) in 1978.<br /><br />Worker pay <a href="http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-2012-extraordinarily-high/">increased 5.4 percent</a> during the same period.<br /><br />Being a highly paid CEO has no basis in actual talent. Over a third of the CEOs ranked as the top 25 well paid during the last 20 years <a href="http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive-excess-2013">have been fired, fined or settled claims of company fraud or whose company received bailout money in 2008</a>. </div></div>

CEO Pay McKesson Jaw-dropping pay package for McKesson's CEO

John Hammergren makes so much money that his company, McKesson, pays him an extra $17,000 for a financial planner to count it all. McKesson...

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