Remapping Debate's new data visualizations show just how much more money the health insurance executives are paid than internists and family practitioners. The gap has been growing over time.

Remapping Debate has analyzed income data for health insurance executives and for doctors in the period between 2000 and 2009, and its new data visualizations demonstrate a striking gap.

The first graph shows that gaps were already substantial in 2000, but more than doubled by 2009.

Among the findings depicted in the second graph: the pay of the highest compensated executive at the 7 largest health insurance companies ranges from being more than 10 times higher than an internist or family practitioner at the 90th percentile of earnings to over 55 times higher.

From Remapping Debate's "about" page:

Remapping Debate is a recently-launched online domestic public policy news journal. We think that there is a fundamental (and democracy-corroding) paradox about the media ecosystem that needs to be addressed: for all the outlets and for all the bytes, the "why'" and "why not'" questions of public policy are too rarely addressed.

Buried behind stories that explicitly or implicitly describe a particular policy as 'natural' or 'inevitable' or 'realistic' are a bevy of underlying assumptions about the 'impracticality' of alternative choices. The result is that robust policy debate is constricted, even at the moments when very large decisions are being made.

Indeed, the treatment of a single policy direction as something akin to a natural phenomenon conceals the fundamental fact that each policy put or kept in place does reflect a decision that serves some interests more than others.

The heart of our work is original reporting. We take seriously the idea that the job of journalists is to question and to illuminate.

Source: PRWEB