$500,000 is a lot of money, I don't want to minimize that, but it would not be the highest paid job on the market. There's a number of roles in medicine, law, finance, and nowadays software that pay more for fewer managerial duties. There really isn't much room to argue for cutting executive pay without arguing that it's unimportant to get the best people in executive roles.

And that's an argument you can certainly have, but it seems strange to make it a precondition to fixing the healthcare system, when cutting executive pay would resolve only a small fraction of the problem.