Murphy said national discussion needed about profit in medical care

An impasse between ECU Health and insurer UnitedHealthcare shows that advances in medical technology like those offered by Nipro can't help when patients can't afford the treatment, Pitt County's congressman said.

U.S. Rep. Greg Murphy, R-N.C., responded to questions about the dispute over reimbursement rates after touring the Nipro Medical Corporation facility under construction on Old Creek Road north of Greenville on Friday.

The contract between ECU Health and UnitedHealthcare expired on Wednesday because they couldn't reach an agreement on reimbursements. The result means that UHC clients must pay higher out-of-network costs for many services at ECU Health.

Several months ago, the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing with CEOs of the nation's largest insurers, Murphy said.

The Greenville urologist and surgeon asked about the "ever-increasing egregious practices of insurance companies and the unbelievable amount of money they are amassing," he said.

"The fact is that in their boardrooms now, the main conversation is profits over patients. And it's perfectly personified here in eastern North Carolina, where ECU Health has carried the mantle in the United States of trying to address rural health care," Murphy said.

"Here you have a greedy, absolutely just ridiculous profit-over-patients insurance company trying to squeeze pennies out of the people of eastern North Carolina. It's horrible," he said. "This is the worst example of the greed of the insurance industry, and United has led this."

Murphy said he prays UnitedHealthcare comes to its senses because the outcome is horrible for patients.

Since the Affordable Care Act, there's been an explosion of vertical integration within the health care system, Murphy said. That means a single company owns or controls multiple parts of its supply chain.

Murphy said it's a main driver of costs because the bureaucracy it creates takes money without providing real benefit to patients.

"At some point, I think the national conversation that has to occur is what is the role of profit in health care," Murphy said.

Should for-profit hospitals be allowed to exist, he asked, and should huge corporations like UnitedHealthcare, the third-largest U.S. company by revenue according to Forbes 2025 Fortune 500, be forced apart and divided into smaller businesses?

"We've just gotten to the point. Yes, we have wonderful factories like this that are providing a much-needed resource for dialysis, which we know in eastern North Carolina, we have such a large, large population of individuals that need dialysis, but things cost so much," Murphy said. "Where is that cost coming from? What is the value that's given to the patient? How do we keep physicians in practice?"

If the current practices of insurance companies are allowed to continue, rural America will be bankrupted, Murphy said.

"I'm not going to allow that to happen. We can't allow that to happen," he said.