Is the colossal compensation given to Big Pharma CEOs coming out of your pocket?

If you take any prescription drugs and don’t have the kind of health-care plan that picks up the tab, you know how much some of those little pills can set you back.

The drug makers will tell you they have to charge that much to fund the R&D necessary to create them (and, of course, to advertise them to us on TV).

But there’s another cost they don’t talk about. That’s the pay they give their head honchos.

Six Big Pharma CEOs were among those listed by The New York Times as getting some gigantic “compensation packages” last year.

The Times called it the “Invasion of the Supersalaries.”

If you got any drugs made by Abbot, you helped CEO Miles White earn his $20.5 million salary. And Richard Gonzalez of AbbVie, an Abbot spinoff, took in $18.5 million — twice what he earned the year before. (Maybe AbbVie should be called “Abracadabra” instead.)

Then there’s John Lechleiter of Eli Lilly, whose pay rose by 10 percent to $11.2 million. And he got that stupendous amount at the same time the company was laying off 1,000 sales reps and freezing other salaries because two of its patents expired.

So clearly these guys can afford to buy their own pills. But since they’re “insiders” and know a lot more about them then we ever will, I can’t help wondering if they actually do.

Sources:

“Report: Biopharma CEOs score ‘supersalaries’ even as sales decline” Arlene Weintraub, April 21, 2014, FiercePharma, fiercepharma.com