Dr. Murphy is a urologist and apparently has had some significant patient experience as well. His more lengthy comment was, ”You know I don’t agree with Mark Cuban often, but we do agree that what needs to happen is that you guys need to be broken up. The vertical integration has destroyed competition in this country and again if I had my way, I’d turn all of you guys into dust. We’d start back from scratch, we’d have competition in the industry. We’d have associated health plans and we would have nonprofit hospitals rather than profit being put over patients.” He added, “It has gotten that bad but you all have been very derelict in your duty and abuse this position of authority. There has been systematic denial and delay of care. It took me eight denials myself to get a medicine that I need to exist.”

At the same hearing the obvious dissatisfaction was bipartisan. Congresswoman Debby Dingle from Michigan, had the following comment, “A CBS news analysis of about 1.3 billion Federal health insurance claims across three years shows that in 2024 insures denied 19% of in network claims, about one in five. United healthcare in particular denied as many as 1/3 of its federal claims in the preceding two years, all while raking in record profits of 400 billion dollars.”

To understand this surprising consensus and to put some dollar figures in perspective, what follows are the individual compensations and company incomes of the five CEO’s giving testimony:

David Joyner, Chairman & CEO, CVS Health received a total compensation of approximately $17.8 million for the 2024 fiscal year. This package included a base salary of roughly $1.1 million, with the majority of the compensation coming from stock and options.

Source: Link

CVS Health posted a $4.6B profit in 2024.

Gail Boudreaux, President & CEO of Elevance Health received a total compensation of approximately $20.47 million for the 2024 fiscal year. Her 2024 package consisted of a $1.6 million base salary, $1.14 million in bonus/non-equity incentive plan, $12.6 million in stock awards, and $4.2 million in option awards.

Source: Link

Elevance Health 2024 Profits Hit $6 Billion Despite Rising Costs.

Below is a summary of the compensation paid in 2024 to Blue Shield of California’s President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Paul Markovich.
$11,191,674.
Nonprofit Blue Shield of California reported a net income of $103 million in 2024.

David Cordani, Cigna chair and CEO
Salary: $1,573,077
Stock awards: $15,214,154
Option awards: $3,340,009
Non-equity incentive plan compensation: $2,720,000
Change in pension value and deferred compensation: $31,059
Other compensation: $372,797
Total compensation: $23,251,096.

Source: Link

UnitedHealth Group has appointed Stephen Hemsley as its new/returning Chief Executive Officer, with $60 million in equity, in addition to a base salary set at $1 million. This figure is notably lower than his predecessor Andrew Witty’s compensation package, which reached an impressive total of approximately $26.3 million in 2024.

Source: https://www.axios.com/2025/05/14/unitedhealth-ceo-equity-security

Also turned out that when asked if they agreed that “the healthcare system was broken?,” 4 out of 5 CEO’s immediately raised their hands indicating yes. Ms. Boudreaux hesitated somewhat to agree with that conclusion. There was greater agreement on the finger-pointing towards rising hospital and pharmacy costs as being most blameworthy; while there was no raising of the question whether perhaps their own salaries and profits made a significant contribution to excessive system costs. 

Take note here that despite its $103 million in 2024, BC/BS of CA surprisingly has “non-profit” designation status, throwing a monkey wrench into part of Dr Murphy’s imagined fix. The US healthcare system is an intentionally, not incidentally, opaque system and is not amenable to simple fixes. As both a patient and as a physician I have felt Dr. Murphy’s same intense ”turn all of you guys into dust” frustration. 

My own take here is that there is plenty of blame to go around with no completely innocent parties, except for the ill children! In my lengthy physician experience, I’ve found that we adult/more mature adolescent patients, occasionally accompanied by our physicians’ preference as well, at times want more testing and treatment than what is clearly in our best interest (most often as a result of medical uncertainty and an accompanying effort to relieve suffering). But at least neither side in the patient-physician relationship is pocketing millions of dollars in that exchange.

Re the more culpable, and resistant to modification, dollar-driven decision-making of the business folks, I find this quote from Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle most pertinent, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.”

New Jersey native and New Hampshire resident, Dr. Drew Remignanti, MD, MPH, author of The Healing Connection: A Partnership for Your Health (https://drewremignanti.pubsitepro.com/) writes from the dual perspective of a 40 year career emergency physician and of a 50 year career chronic autoimmune disease patient. He considers himself well educated by Dartmouth College, Rutgers Medical School, the Medical College of Wisconsin, as well as 15 hospitalizations, seven abdominal surgeries, and a major disabling stroke in 1992 at age 38. He wrote his book for the benefit of those of us who are involuntarily enduring medical suffering, as well as those who are voluntarily attempting to alleviate medical suffering in its myriad manifestations. https://drewremignanti.pubsitepro.com