Health Insurance Startup CEOs’ Sky-High Compensation Figures Are Deceiving

Dec 02
Dec 02, 2022

In AIS Health’s annual roundup of health insurer executive compensation data, four newly public startup insurers stand out because their CEOs’ total compensation in 2021 easily outstrips that of chief executives at major firms like UnitedHealth Group and Cigna Corp. However, experts tell AIS Health that the startups’ filings with federal regulators paint an unintentionally deceiving picture, as the CEOs of those not-yet-profitable firms are highly unlikely to collect hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of stock awards listed there.

“They’re never going to realize, in one year, that much compensation,” says Ari Gottlieb, a principal at A2 Strategy Group who has been closely tracking the performance of the four startup insurers that went public in 2021: Alignment Healthcare, Inc., Bright Health Group, Inc., Clover Health Investments Corp. and Oscar Health, Inc.
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Leslie Small

Leslie has been working in journalism since 2009 and reporting on the health care industry since 2014. She has covered the many ups and downs of the Affordable Care Act exchanges, the failed health insurer mega-mergers, and hundreds of other storylines spanning subjects such as Medicaid managed care, Medicare Advantage, employer-sponsored insurance, and prescription drug coverage. As the managing editor of Health Plan Weekly and Radar on Drug Benefits, she writes and edits for both publications while overseeing a small team of reporters who also focus on the managed care sector. Before joining AIS Health, she was a senior editor for the e-newsletter Fierce Health Payer, and she started her career as a copy editor at multiple local newspapers. She graduated with a dual degree in journalism and political science from Penn State University.