Health Plan Weekly

Nonprofit HCSC’s CEO Is Outearning For-Profit Insurer Execs — Is That Fair?

  • Feb 14
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    Feb 14, 2025

    For two years in a row, the CEO of the nonprofit Health Care Service Corp. (HCSC) received compensation that outstripped the chief executives of all the major publicly traded health insurance companies, including Centene Corp., CVS Health Corp.’s Aetna, Elevance Health, Inc., Molina Healthcare, Inc., The Cigna Group and UnitedHealth Group. 

    HCSC, which owns Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, has been led by CEO Maurice Smith since 2020. In 2023, Smith outearned every health insurance CEO except for Oscar Health, Inc.’s Mark Bertolini, whose total compensation was $44.5 million, according to AIS Health’s latest analysis of executive compensation data from the country’s largest health insurers. Smith also outearned every other CEO in 2022 except John Kao, the CEO of another newly public insurtech company, Alignment Healthcare, 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.

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