When you think of big health care companies you probably think of brand names like CIGNA, Aetna, UnitedHealth or Humana. These days, when I hear “health care companies” I think of rabid angry liberals foaming at the mouth over the audacity of profit. Remember Hillary saying that she wants to “take those profits?”Remember when everyone was really angry last summer over “obscene” oil company profits? I wrote about this back then, and I need to revisit the topic thanks to the health care debate.
Brainiacs like Rachel Maddow will show you simple charts showing the big profit numbers that insurance companies generate. In the case of the oil companies they generated billions in profits. Insurance companies have generated millions in profits. But idiots like Maddow are focusing on profit, not profit margin. Profit is a sum total (or loss), it is how much money you have left after doing business. Profit margin is the ratio of what you have left versus how much you spent to generate those profits.
Last summer people wer quite upset at the oil companies, then shut the heck up when they learned that they were making a mer 3-4% on their money. Sure, they made billions, but they spent many billions more to generate those profits. This year the enemy is the big evil insurance industry. How does it compare to the oil industry?
- CIGNA: 9.69%
- Aetna: 4.00%
- United Health: 3.97%
- Humana: 3.57%
Hardly monstrous. In fact, CIGNA is the only company in the health care sector with a profit margin above 5%. It is an outlier. Hospitals average 3.5% profit, and Health Care Plans average 3.3%. (source) In fact, in the list of industry profit margins, the evil Bush/Cheney Health Care companies are #86. Oh my.. so scary.
What about other evil conservative-loving industries? Like big oil, the specific sector of Oil & Gas is evil, with an average profit margin in that industry of 9.7%. How do they sleep at night? What about Accident & Health Insurance companies? How does a profit margin of 3.8% sound? Wait, oil & gas drilling and exploration companies are double evil since they make money while destroying nature. They do alright with profit margins of 9.7%.
We now have two summers of highly publicized and well-documented liberal anti-profit angst to serve as the basis of my next point. If I follow the libtards mindset correctly, profits above 5% are obscene and should be redistributed or eliminated altogether. We’ve seen the video, we’ve heard the cries. The libtards have drawn this line in the sand. (sidebar: I love calling liberals “libtards.” They hate it when we use their own tactics against them, in this case, name calling.)
If you are a liberal and you can’t stand health care profits, perhaps you should give up your health care, and while you are at it, stop using products that generate even more profit. Which companies?
- Brewing companies average 25.9%
- Software companies average 22.7%
- Cigarette companies average 17.4%
- Wineries average 11.8%
- Domestic Telecommunications companies average 8.9%
- Home Health Care = 8.4%
- Personal Computer Manufacturers make 7.5%
- Footwear companies average 6.4%
- Evil Auto Parts stores? 5.8%
- Periodical Publishers (magazines) make 5.2%
What about specific companies? Are you libtards ready to give up any of these?
- Coke: 24.64%
- Hansen (Monster Energy Drinks): 19.08%
- Dr. Pepper/Snapple: 10.67
- Iconix: (London Fogg, Joe Boxer, Ocean Pacific, Waverly, Starter): 34.90%
- Coach: 18.75% (what do you expect when you spend $500 for a purse?)
- Popeye’s Chicken 17.93%
What is my point? Some companies will make massive profits because thy do massive amounts of business transactions. If 5% is too much profit for Humana or Exxon/Mobile, why isn’t Hillary Clinton legislating the confiscation of profits from Coke, Coach or Popeye’s? They are financially raping Americans far more severely than the insurance companies, right? So, if you are a good, non-hypocritical liberal able to live your life guilt free, be sure to give up that cigarette and coke during your work break, go ahead and sell your purse, and forget about picking up some chicken on the way home from work. Don’t bother snuggling up to a good magazine with a glass of wine. Forget about using that laptop. You can’t do any of these things because doing so supports obscene profits.
I hear Amish country is beautiful this time of year.
Hat tip to 1800blogger.com.
I love the sound of whining in the morning.
Rush Limbaugh has signed a deal that simply kicks ass. Eight years, $400 million. $50 million a year. I love it. Unlike sports contracts and the expected deliverable for the athlete, Rush actually provides America with mental stimulation and food for thought. He does this year round and his travel schedule and show prep rivals that of any athlete. I love that athletes can make huge money. I love that oil execs can do the same. Ditto for the Hollywood elite. But for some reason Liberals are screaming about this new contract.
Hello? McFly? Have you heard of something called supply and demand? Oh, that’s right. Air America failed miserably and therefore you are hoping that the ‘Fairness’ Doctrine will come in and suppress all conservative free speech on the radio to make up for the fact that Liberals don’t buy advertising time and don’t have any pull when it comes to radio. Liberals dominate print media, newspapers, television networks and all products from hollywood (movies, cartoons, tv series, etc.). good old fashioned radio is the lone delivery method for conservative thought and opinion. Yet the left can’t leave radio alone. In the name of ‘fairness’ they want to muzzle free speech. Newsflash, “ain’t gonna happen bitch. Deal with it.”
And before we go crazy over how much Rush will be making let’s properly frame this. Fourteen other media personalities made more than $50M over the 12-month period between July 2006/ June 2007 as listed at the Forbes Top 100 Power list.
- Oprah Winfrey: Liberal powerhouse, arguably the most powerful woman in the world; makes $18M per year from XM alone. All in all she made about $260M last year. The other thirteen making more than $50M per year are as follows:
- Jerry Bruckheimer: $120M – Action movie mogul (most recently the Pirates of the Caribbean series)
- Steven Spielberg: $110M – Hollywood deity. ‘Nuff said.
- Tiger Woods: $100M -Golf deity. ‘Nuff said.
- Johnny Depp: $92M – Cute, damned good actor. Weird. More power to him.
- Rolling Stones: $88M – Possibly the most over-rated band evah. No wait. They are #3 on my list.
- Jay-Z: $83M – Not my cup of tea, but he has an audience. Capitalism is a wonderful thing.
- Tom Hanks: $74 M – The greatest actor of our generation.
- Madonna: $72 M – She jumped the shark long ago.
- Howard Stern: $70M – He too has an audience. Too bad they are largely immature and capable of making Johnny Knoxville look sophisticated.
- Brian Grazer/Ron Howard: $70 M – Insane profit from The Da Vinci Code. See, mocking religion can still earn you a decent living.
- Bon Jovi: $67M – Talk about jumping the shark. They did that two decades ago. But, as long as you have demand you will always have supply.
- Jerry Seinfeld: $60M – I’m not sure which aspect of hs genius is greater: His reality-based comedy or his business acumen and success thanks to syndication.
- Elton John: $53M – Forget the sunglasses, his earlier hits are timeless. Much deeper than anything Bon Jovi, Jay-Z or Madonna every produced. And he actually plays an instrument.
- Bonus Track: A list of the top paid athletes can be found here:
Congratulations Rush. Congratulations Conservative Talk Radio. Congratulations America.
Our elected officials are apparently having lots of fun fluffing up their chest feathers to publicly demean the leaders of our oil companies. They are trying to scold and reprimand leaders that are doing what they can to provide oil for America. The last time I checked, America was the land of opportunity, the the opportunity to make profit is one of the reasons people from all over the world want to come here.
Much of the pubic, and apparently most of Congress, thinks that the oil companies are raping America. I’ll bet you a Memorial Day hot dog that these same people haven’t considered what profit margins other companies make. Let’s take a look at the numbers:
Sample Profit Margins from2007
- Paychex Inc. (a leader in payroll processing) 27.61%
- Nvidia (PC video card manufacturer) 19.46%
- International Water Guard (pollution control) 18.02%
- Western Union Co. 17.50%
- Procter & Gamble 13.76%
- Colgate Palmolive 12.91%
- Canon 11.25%
- Life Time Fitness 10.37%
- Exxon Mobil 10.37
- Chevron 8.49
- BP 7.85
- ConocoPhillips 5.86
Plenty of companies enjoyed far greater profit margins last year. No complaints from Congress? Why not? Now let’s look at the past five years:
Sample Five Year Average Net Profit Margins
- Microsoft = 26.7%
- Intel = 19.1%
- Washington Mutual = 18.9%
- Charles Schwab = 17.2%
- 3M = 15.6%
- Proctor & Gamble = 12.6%
- American Express = 12.6%
- McDonalds = 11.7%
- HR Block = 11.6%
- Apple = 10.0%
- Exxon Mobil = 9.6%
This is just a quick list that I picked out of the Fortune 500. With more time I’m sure I could find even higher margins and more familiar names. But here’s an interesting tidbit. In 2007 the average five-year profit margin for the entire S&P 500 was 11.8. These five hundred companies on average had higher profit margins than our major oil companies. Yet “big oil” is somehow the the bad guy?
The issue at hand is that people are only seeing only the dollar amounts and not the percentages. One thing that people are not really talking about is the cut that the government gets from gas at the pump. On average, about 4% of the cost of a gallon of gas goes to ‘big oil’ while Uncle Sam, who has done nothing whatsoever to help petroleum companies in 30 years gets about 15% of the money. The government is getting almost four times as much money from gas sales as the companies that produce the fuel, and they have the audacity to berate the leaders of these firms? The government had nothing to do with the acquisition, refining, production, shipping and delivering of this product, yet they receive 400% more per gallon than the oil companies? This is almost as stupid as taxing someone’s net worth because they just died.
So the peeps in Congress are in a little bit of a bind. They feel compelled to publicly abuse oil executives, but at the same time they can’t be too mean because this industry is generating a major amount of tax revenue. Yet, they still dish out clueless tirades that had nothing to do with economic reality.
This makes me wonder: When do our politicians get to sit in front of a public hearing committee so that they can be asked questions by us bout their wanton ineptitude and blatant disregard for the people?
