CEO turnovers are up — considerably, at possibly the highest rate in years.

One of the reasons cited by analysts is that while the profits of the “Magnificent Seven” (Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Nvidia, Meta Platforms, and Tesla) have ballooned in recent years, the returns of other corporations, while perfectly decent, aren’t keeping pace, and the corporate boards of other corporacions are demanding more from their CEOs.

So… everyone wants more profits, and CEO’s who don’t deliver get sacked or are forced out.

At the same time, there are only three ways to increase profits – be more innovative, cut costs, and raise prices. Being more innovative usually means using knowledge and technology to do more with fewer people or less material. Fewer people means more stress on those who remain, and even more stress on those who lose jobs. Less material means less durable products and higher costs to customers over time. Cutting costs means paying people less or paying fewer people and/or paying suppliers less.

In short, pushing for more and more profit screws pretty much everyone (and sometimes even CEOs) except large shareholders.

Or put another way, when is more profit too much? Or is it ever too much?

So often in my life, I’ve heard, or overheard, phrases along the lines of, “It’s not personal; we need to make a change…” Or it’s not personal because corporate headquarters, or the state legislature, or someone else cut the funding. It might not be “personal” because the business is failing.

But whatever the cause, to the person or people affected, it’s personal; it’s very personal.

And for large corporations, such as United Healthcare, it’s definitely never personal. It’s just about the need to maintain profit, and whether the so-called “impersonal” axe falls on employees being let go or policyholders not getting the benefits they paid for, the corporation seldom, if ever, considers the personal costs.

Yet, in a way, many of the “personal decisions” are in fact personal, just not in the way most people would consider personal. Corporate profit increases tend to boost the price of the stock, and, in the case of most CEOs, increasing profits and stock prices increase their compensation. According to the latest publicly reported information, Brian Thompson was paid slightly more than $10 million annually. But his salary was only one million dollars. The rest, 90%, came from stock, stock options, and bonuses.

So those decisions on how to raise profits had a decidedly personal effect on Mr. Thompson. He may not have considered the algorithms “personal,” but they not only increased the negative effects of healthcare denials and delays on policy holders in order to increase profits., but also significantly increased his personal compensation.

Not personal… really?

In the case of Brian Thompson’s murder, there’s been a decidedly strong reaction on both sides, and that clouds the underlying issues that led to his death.

According to all reports, Thompson was a devoted and dedicated husband and family man, and a respected and well-liked colleague by those in the health insurance field. The healthcare industry is clearly stunned by the public reaction and how many people viewed his death with little or no sympathy.

But the fact is that Thompson was also a cold-eyed, analytical, profit-maximizing executive who clearly had no difficulty making decisions and implementing programs and systems that devastated thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of families in order to maintain or increase corporate profit margins. During his tenure as President of United Healthcare, Thompson raised profits from $10 billion to $16 billion, a sixty percent increase in three years. During that period, UnitedHealthcare was rated the worst of all U.S. healthcare firms in denying claims, turning down 32% of all claims, twice the industry average of 16%. For this, he was paid over $10 million last year.

What I find disturbing is the “mainstream” news media’s emphasis on Thompson the family man and nice guy persona, who was unjustly murdered. I’m not condoning the murder or the murderer, who appears to personify anti-establishment zealotry, and represents, on the other side, the same lack of humanity that Thompson represented professionally in his time with United Healthcare.

Just because Thompson was a loving devoted family man in his personal life and a good professional colleague doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a cold-blooded bastard in designing, implementing, and using methodologies designed to deny healthcare to people who had already paid for what they believed was adequate coverage.

At least one media newscaster made a comment along the lines that Thompson was just doing his job, but what was his job? Was it to effectively fund the healthcare of millions of Americans so that they could receive proper medical treatment, or was it principally to increase the profits of United Healthcare? That 32% rejection rate and 60% profit increase strongly suggest that the health of United Healthcare’s Medicare Advantage and other patients came in a distant second place to increased profits.

And the healthcare insurance industry is stunned by the reaction to his murder?

Utah state legislators are “renowned” for talking out of both sides of their mouth. One of their proudest achievements is reducing state income taxes for four straight years, by more than a billion dollars. But what they’re not telling constituents and taxpayers is how little those tax cuts really mean… and what they actually cost.

For example, the latest tax cut was estimated to reduce the tax bill of Utah taxpayers by $167 million, which sounds significant, but isn’t. The lowest quintile of taxpayers would only get a $24 tax cut. Upper middleclass taxpayers, those making $200,000, would receive $174. In addition, Utah is one of only eight states to tax Social Security income.

In the meantime, the legislature just mandated a fifteen-million-dollar budget cut for the university (SUU) where my wife works and a hiring freeze, as well as comparable cuts for all state universities. Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz, a Republican, recently stated that, in addition to that cut, the Legislature was exploring cuts of around ten percent across all sixteen of the state’s public colleges and universities in 2025.

This might make some sense if enrollment were declining, but Utah is the only state in the union where non-immigrant population is growing, almost certainly because the Mormon faith continues to emphasize large families. In response, SUU’s enrollment grew by 1,000 students this school year (up to nearly 16,000), and total public university enrollment grew by over 8,500 students, one of the largest increases in years.

Yet the legislature is mandating that universities accommodate more students and provide more services with less funding. This is at a time when an increasing percentage of teaching employees are leaving the field because of comparatively low pay and increasing bureaucratic and administrative loads having nothing to do with teaching. One of the unmentioned side effects, also, is that the legislature mandated a 3.5% tuition increase for the 2024-2025 school year, so that students and their parents pay more (roughly $300 per student just this year ) while the state funds a smaller and smaller percentage of the costs of running the universities.

But the politicians continue to trumpet near-meaningless tax cuts.

The real question facing Democrats is whether they want to be a successful political party or whether they want to emphasize an ideology that most Americans believe is excessively liberal.

From what polls show and from what I’ve observed, most Democrats don’t fall into far left/woke mindset, but the far left tends to be far more active politically and socially than the more “mainstream” Democrats, and thus tends to have influence out of proportion to its actual numbers.

Recent poll analysis by The New York Times suggests that one of the reasons Kamala Harris lost was that something like seven million Democrats who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 did not vote in 2024. That alone wouldn’t account for her loss, but that combined with more liberal voters who oppose what they see as excessive support of trans/LBTG+ initiatives very well might. Nor did ads suggesting that wives hide their votes from their husbands help, since any woman so inclined didn’t need the ads, and any woman thinking about it would likely be worried that the ad would prompt inquiries by husbands and boyfriends.

Like it or not, a majority of Americans, for whatever reason, are leery of women running for the presidency, and the combination of a woman who was perceived as liberal was also a strong factor in the campaign.

The fact that the Democrats actually made a very slight gain in their numbers in the House of Representatives (if only by one member) at a time when they lost the presidency and the Senate suggests that Democrats who addressed the issues in their districts could be very successful, but that the national ticket had too many negatives.

Not that anyone is going to change their mind based on my observations.