How much healthcare would $400M buy? How about $1.8B?

It seems to have slipped through relatively unnoticed that William McGuire, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, got his ass whipped by the SEC:

McGuire agreed to a settlement the Securities and Exchange Commission valued at $468 million, including giving back $320 million in stock options. He had already agreed to reprice some stock options, reducing their value by another $200 million.

That and a $7 million civil penalty was enough to get the SEC to settle with him. But the SEC said its investigation of the company is continuing, and a review by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York is also outstanding.

Oh but it gets so much worse.

You have to ask, how much healthcare would that money buy if it were circulating in a non-profit healthcare system.  But then there's this:

McGuire ran UnitedHealth for 15 years, turning a regional insurer into what is now the nation's second-largest managed care company. Like many other companies in the 1990s, UnitedHealth rewarded its chairman and CEO with options giving him the right to buy UnitedHealth shares at a fixed price. The value of those options skyrocketed along with the company's share price. McGuire's unexercised options were worth more than $1.75 billion at the end of 2005.

And of course other executives and board members are also having to turn back their ill-gotten gains.

THIS is the best health-care system in the world? For WHOM?

The entire premise of having insurance companies fund healthcare is fatally flawed.  We need single-payer now, and it should be based on the Medicare model, where admin costs run at just 2% of expenditures.  Anything short of that is just making peace with the devil.