"It is difficult for a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair


What would you say if I told you that the CEO of the organization that administers pharmacy health care for North Carolina's Blue Cross makes more than $44,000 a day?

Have I got your attention? The total compensation of Medco Health Solutions CEO David B. Snow was $10.1 million in 2006, which factors out to be $44,300 each business day, based on 228 days, the number of days used as a standard for government contract work.

What about N.C. Blue Cross CEO Robert J. Greczyn? It must be extremely hard to find affordable housing, let alone cover the cost of school tuition for children and health care, as a $14,000-per-day recipient in our not-for-profit corporate welfare state.

According to the Durham Herald-Sun and Raleigh News & Observer, UNC Health Care CEO William Roper recently received a "7.2 percent" pay raise. Other than the announced new $690,000 salary for 2008, there was no mention of just how much of a raise he got. The difference between $489,030, his official 2007 salary, and $690,000 is not 7.2 percent. And after an article appeared in the Chapel Hill Herald that questioned the accuracy of what was reported in the initial pay raise story (and that also went unnoticed by many who had read the misleading state-wide, front-page coverage of Sept 8.), the N&O presented a "follow up" on an inside page of its Oct.16 edition that helped obfuscate the issue further, purporting that (university) "chancellors' raises will help the state."

How does misrepresenting a 41 percent pay increase for a state employee who is not a chancellor help the state? UNC system President Erskine Bowles would probably say that the pay raise helps a public hospital compete with like organizations elsewhere. But what happens when these "competitors," whether they be public or private, raise the salary bar yet again? Rather than leading us toward affordable health care, the approach used here follows, directing the nation and state toward escalating health-care costs and taking the people of North Carolina further into debt.

The bottom line here is that our public "leaders" are jacking up health-care costs in order to provide its top heavy bureaucracy with 41 percent pay raises, at $200,000 a pop.

This is not just a local issue. The CEO of UNC Health Care (a state employee) now serves on the board of New Jersey-based Medco with the former CEO of a pharmaceutical giant who owns her own consulting firm in Woodside, Calif. Medco's public relations pitch, of course, is that it "drives down the cost of pharmacy health," a nice spin to put us all -- consumer and government -- that much deeper into debt. A very large portion of the fees we're charged when paying for "health services" are chiefly designed to do two things: go toward $40,000-a-day salaries to help people like Medco's CEO become extremely wealthy at the expense of Medicare; and pay for overpriced advertising, which only helps to make advertising magnates and media corporations wealthier by giving us all a warm and fuzzy feeling, as Pfizer's Web page suggests, that those in charge of health care "are only interested in one thing, your health."

But just how much Merck, Squibb and Genentech stock is Myrtle Potter (Roper's fellow board member) willing to sacrifice to help Medco -- in which they both own stock -- "drive down the cost of pharmacy health care"? Shouldn't the N&O and the Sacramento Bee, as major dailies covering health issues, be asking these questions? Lots in the press about rising health-care costs in general, but not a word -- in an important election year, I note -- in any major North Carolina daily about specific conflicts of interest in state and national health care. Why, I wonder?

Serving on Medco's board does not help drive down health-care costs. Rather, the purpose of serving on such a board is to yield as large a profit as possible in order to provide comfortably for its CEO and stockholders, which in turn does the same for the CEO of N.C. Blue Cross, minus the stock.

These relationships hold just as much promise for making health care "affordable" as changing the name of the CDC to Centers for Disease Control and Preventive Medicine, an accomplishment marking Roper's tenure there that he considers significant. Did the impact of that three-word change (a profound difference, according to Roper) translate into something substantive for those living in toxic trailers after Hurricane Katrina, which the newly named CDCPM apparently knew of but did nothing about?

The University of North Carolina most likely approved the administrator's appointment to Medco's board with pride in the recognition the administrator had achieved. One would think, however, that if UNC leaders were serious about public service, they would see that their decision serves only to precipitate financial awards for the robber barons of the health industry at great expense of a vulnerable public that has no recourse but to literally pay the price. There will be no change to soaring health-care costs as long as the industry and state government is controlled by those who profit by driving it up.

And to think, UNC Health Care, as it would like us to think from its million-dollar advertising campaign, is "leading, teaching, caring."

That's a heck of a lot of money ... for just three words.