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Donald Unger
4 min readFeb 23, 2021

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CVS is What’s Wrong with Healthcare in the US

CEO Compensation is Obscene:

Pharmacies are Understaffed with Underpaid Workers

Image by Jukka Niittymaa from Pixabay

In the US, we pay twice as much for medical care as just about any other country in the world, for worse results. And how we could possibly “afford” to cover everyone is an ongoing “conundrum.”

Hmm . . . perhaps we should look at CVS, whose CEO, Larry Merlo, got $36.5 million in total compensation, in 2019.

Break that down?

An hour of his “work” was “worth” about $17,600.

A worker — perhaps at CVS — getting the federal minimum wage, $7.25/hr., putting in eight-hour days, five days per week, fifty-two weeks per year, would pull down an annual salary of $15,080.

That’s . . . I grope for words here.

Oh, now I remember: That’s WRONG!

When we talk about “growing economic inequality”? Look no further than your local CVS, where the median employee salary, in 2019, was $46,140, making the CEO pay ratio 790:1.

What the average employee made in a year?

CEO Merlo made in less than half a day.

Yeah, I’m a . . . Frequent-Pharmacy-Flyer

On the old sitcom, Cheers, one of the characters was such a “diligent” drinker that when he…

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Donald Unger
Donald Unger

Written by Donald Unger

I write what I know and what I’ve lived: humor & chronic pain; politics & parenting; business writing & cultural analysis; and . . . ranting (a lot of ranting).

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