> You can see that the company’s net income — i.e., its total profit — was $23.1 billion in 2023. That’s a lot of money, but it pales in comparison to the $241.9 billion that the company spent on medical costs.2 Even the company’s $54.6 billion in operating costs — of which Brian Thompson’s own $10 million salary represented 0.018% — are dwarfed by actual medical costs.<p>> What does this mean? It means that if UnitedHealth Group decided to donate every single dollar of its profit to buying Americans more health care, it would only be able to pay for about 9.3% more health care than it’s already paying for. If it donated all of its executives’ salaries to the effort, it would not be much more than that.<p>Than is still tens of billions of dollars and a material amount of care being diverted to comp and shareholder returns.<p>> But when we look at United Health Group’s operating costs in the diagram above, they’re only 22.6% of the actual cost of medical care.<p>Only! That’s between 1/4th and 1/5th of total costs!<p>The need to eliminate for-profit health insurance companies <i>and</i> implement cost controls (as mentioned at the bottom of the piece) can both be true.