America's 2007 Petulant Plutocrat of the Year!

By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality. Posted December 20, 2007.

Drum roll, please. The time has come to name our Petulant Plutocrat of the Year.

This year, that's not easy. We simply have too many terrific candidates. War profiteers. Private equity fund strip-and-flip corporate takeover artists. Investment bankers setting Wall Street bonus records betting on subprime mortgages.

These movers and shakers all meet our basic threshold for Petulant Plutocrat of the Year consideration: They all have accumulated vast fortunes -- at the expense of average Americans -- and they all feel they deserve even more.

But, in the end, none of these outstanding candidates have made this year's final Petulant Plutocrat cut. We have found our 2007 Petulant Plutocrat of the Year elsewhere -- in the corporate snakepit known as the health care industry.

Health care, of course, makes for a natural Petulant Plutocrat hunting ground.

No other industry in the United States, over the past quarter-century, has become more expensive, impersonal, aggravating -- and profitable. And few individuals, within health care, have profited any more from this ongoing disaster area than William W. McGuire, our 2007 Petulant Plutocrat of the Year.

Last December, McGuire stepped down as the CEO of UnitedHealth, the nation's largest health insurer, with a fortune worth thousands of times more than the net worth of the typical American family.

This December, one year later, McGuire agreed to give $418 million of that fortune back, in the largest out-of-CEO-pocket corporate scandal settlement ever. But McGuire, who'll turn 60 next year, remains phenomenally wealthy, and he still hasn't acknowledged any guilt.

Indeed, last week, McGuire had his lawyers in federal court, blasting away at a judge who had tried to freeze some of McGuire's assets until all legal claims against him can be settled. The lawyers called that move "manifestly unjust."

The lawyers had a novel argument. Unlike other recently disgraced CEOs like Citigroup's Charles Prince and Merrill Lynch's Stanley O'Neal, they contended, William McGuire didn't run his company "in the ditch."

The lawyers have a point. McGuire, in his 15 years as UnitedHealth CEO, didn't run his company "in the ditch." What did he do? McGuire simply helped pump up a health care crisis that's driving American families "in the ditch." Almost 20 percent of working families with insurance are now paying over 10 percent of their incomes on health care.

For this career achievement, William W. McGuire truly deserves to be our Petulant Plutocrat of the Year.

This won't be McGuire's first award. Back in 2001, Worth magazine named McGuire one of America's "50 Best CEOs." At the time, he appeared to merit that distinction. McGuire had, after all, built UnitedHealth from an unknown for-profit regional HMO into a national health insurance colossus.

McGuire, to construct this colossus, followed standard contemporary CEO operating procedure. He didn't create a good company. He created a big one -- by orchestrating merger after merger, over 30 in all, from 1991, his first year as UnitedHealth CEO.

This merger blitz would hike UnitedHealth's annual revenues from about $600 million to $70 billion -- and send UnitedHealth's share price soaring over fifty-fold.

Each merger would also bring a torrent of reassuring rhetoric. In 1998, for instance, McGuire confidently claimed that mergers give his company "the size, scale, and operating efficiencies needed to accelerate investments in high quality health and well-being services."

Seven years later, celebrating a 2005 merger with PacifiCare, McGuire vowed that UnitedHealth would always be working to "lower costs and make things simpler for consumers."

"We are really intent," McGuire added, "on cutting down on hassle."

But the average Americans these mergers shoved into the UnitedHealth corporate family -- the company now collects monthly premiums from about one in six insured U.S. households -- have never quite experienced anything close to a hassle-free health care heaven.

UnitedHealth, under McGuire, became notorious for poor customer service, especially for foot-dragging on paying claims.

"It's amazing," the Nebraska Hospital Association's Roger Keetle last year told the Lincoln Journal Star, "that a company with these resources can't figure out how to pay a claim."

See more stories tagged with: workplace, corporate crime, ceo pay

Sam Pizzigati is the editor of the online weekly Too Much, and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

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