Greg Murphy Healthcare Lies North Carolina

Greg Murphy Says Drug Cartels Are More Ethical Than Health Insurers. Then He Voted for the Bill Taking Coverage From 195,000 North Carolinians.

The only practicing physician in Congress told insurance CEOs he'd "turn all of you guys into dust." He is right about them. He also voted Aye on Trump's budget bill, and didn't vote at all on the bill to lower premiums.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 11, 2026

Greg Murphy Says Drug Cartels Are More Ethical Than Health Insurers. Then He Voted for the Bill Taking Coverage From 195,000 North Carolinians.

Greg Murphy is the only member of Congress who still sees patients. He's a urologist in Greenville, North Carolina, and he does it for free, because House rules won't let him be paid for it.

That gives him standing almost nobody else in the building has. And when he uses it, he is worth listening to.

At a House Ways and Means hearing in January 2026, Murphy told a row of health insurance executives:

"You have put profits above patients and you have put profits above those who care for patients."

And then:

"You guys need to be broken up. The vertical integration has destroyed competition in this country and again if I had my way, I'd turn all of you guys into dust."

On a physicians' podcast he went further, saying of insurers: "Some of our drug cartels are more ethical than our insurance companies." Of UnitedHealthcare specifically: "I think some of those people ought to go to jail."

He isn't performing. He knows the machine from both ends. About eighteen months before that hearing, Murphy was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor and had two surgeries. He then needed medication to do the job his pituitary gland no longer could. Here is what happened to a sitting United States congressman with a brain tumor:

"I had a total of eight denials from the beginning of trying to get the first medicine to finally trying to get the last medicine before I got it."

We checked his money, because that's usually where these stories go. It doesn't go there. Murphy's campaign has taken nothing from UnitedHealth, Cigna, Elevance, Humana, CVS/Aetna, Centene, Molina, or the insurance industry's trade group this cycle, according to his FEC filings. Nobody bought this position. He means it.

Which makes what he did with his vote much harder to explain.

The vote

On July 3, 2025, the House took up the final version of Trump's budget bill. Murphy voted Aye.

That bill is the largest cut to health coverage in American history. For North Carolina specifically, the state stands to lose an estimated $49.9 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade — money that pays rural hospitals and the doctors in them. An estimated 195,000 North Carolinians are projected to lose their health coverage.

Murphy's district is eastern North Carolina. It is not the part of the state with spare hospitals.

Here is the thing a urologist knows better than a lobbyist: a patient with no insurance at all does not get a prior-authorization denial. They get nothing. There is no appeal, no eighth attempt, no medication at the end of it. The people Murphy voted to knock off Medicaid don't get to have the fight he had. They don't get to the starting line.

He told insurance executives they put profits above patients. Then he voted for a bill that takes the patients out of the equation entirely.

And the vote he didn't cast

On December 17, 2025, the House passed H.R. 6703, the Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act. It was the vehicle for dealing with the expiring health insurance tax credits — the ones whose lapse is driving premiums up for millions of people.

The clerk's record for Roll Call 349 lists Greg Murphy as Not Voting.

The one member of Congress who actually practices medicine, the one who says insurers belong in prison, was not recorded on the health insurance premium bill.

What he does instead

Murphy's actual legislative energy goes somewhere narrower. In May 2026 the Ways and Means Committee passed his Provider Reimbursement Stability Act, H.R. 8163, on a 44-0 vote. It raises the spending threshold that triggers automatic Medicare fee cuts from $20 million to $54.3 million and caps year-to-year swings in physician payment.

That's a decent bill. It also happens to be the bill the doctors' lobbies want most. Seven medical specialty PACs — anesthesiologists, ophthalmologists, radiologists, orthopaedic surgeons, neurosurgeons, dermatologists and his own former practice group — have together given Murphy more than $250,000, as we've laid out before.

So the pattern isn't that Murphy is bought by insurers. It's narrower and stranger than that. On the fights where physicians and insurers are the two parties, he shows up swinging. On the fight over whether ordinary people have any coverage at all, he voted with his party and moved on.

What it would take to mean it

Murphy is right that insurance companies deny care for profit. He's right that vertical integration has hollowed out competition. He is one of the few Republicans in Congress willing to say so with the CEOs in the room.

None of that is worth much to a family in Pitt or Lenoir County who loses Medicaid. They will not be denied care by an algorithm. They'll just stop going.

Murphy asked to have his own pay withheld during the March 2026 Homeland Security funding lapse, because federal workers weren't getting paid. It was a real gesture and it cost him something. Constituents in his district have been demanding a town hall and holding one without him when he didn't come.

He should go. He'd be the most credible person in the room on what insurance companies do to sick people. He'd also have to explain the vote.