CEO compensation makes up a tiny fraction of health insurance premiums, typically far less than 1%.
Here’s a breakdown:
🔹 1. Typical Health Insurance Premiums
- Average annual family premium (2025): about $24,000–$25,000
- Average single coverage: around $8,000–$9,000
🔹 2. CEO Pay at Major Insurers
In 2023–2024, total compensation for top insurance CEOs was roughly:
UnitedHealth Group Andrew Witty~$20 million
CVS Health (Aetna) Karen Lynch~$28 million
Cigna David Cordani~$21 million
Elevance (Anthem) Gail Boudreaux~$21 million
Humana Bruce Broussard~$17 million
These companies have revenues between $100 billion and $370 billion a year.
So, for example:
- UnitedHealth revenue: ~$370 billion
- CEO pay: ~$20 million
- Portion = 20 million / 370 billion = 0.000054%
That’s about 5 one-hundred-thousandths of one percent of revenue — and since premiums are the main revenue source, CEO pay is effectively well below 0.01% of your premium.
While CEO pay is often controversial, it does not significantly impact insurance costs. Premiums are driven mainly by:
- Hospital and drug prices
- Administrative costs and marketing
- Medical loss ratio (claims paid out vs. premiums)
- Regulatory and profit margins (~3–5%)
CEO pay is large in absolute dollars, but it’s negligible in the context of overall premiums — typically less than one penny per dollar of what policyholders pay, often closer to one-hundredth of a penny.
In the case of UnitedHealth Group as the example, CEO compensation is about 0.0054% of total revenue — or about 5 cents per $1,000 of revenue. So, about $1.35 of a $25,000 family premium would represent the CEO’s entire annual compensation.
Considering all executive compensation, about $13.50 per year per family, or 0.05% of the premium
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 