Before Prenuvo sold a $2,499 whole-body MRI and Fountain Life sold a $21,500 membership, hospitals were already selling a version of the same pitch. The executive physical — a comprehensive, single-day preventive workup bundling extensive labs, imaging, and specialist time into one concierge visit — dates back to the 1970s, originally as a corporate perk for senior leadership. It’s the direct ancestor of every venture-backed longevity clinic covered elsewhere on this site, minus the genomics and the biological-age dashboard, plus something most of those newer companies don’t have: a peer-reviewed study that actually checked what’s inside the box.
That study is the reason this article exists. In 2019, researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center published a JAMA analysis of executive physical packages at 29 of the country’s top-ranked hospitals — and found something most buyers of a $5,000 checkup would probably want to know before booking. We’ll get to exactly what they found. First, the seven programs themselves, compared on the same fixed criteria: real pricing, what’s included, and how each handles insurance.
TL;DR
- Executive health programs at top US hospitals range from about $1,200 (UCLA’s basic package) to $25,000 (Cleveland Clinic’s premium cardiovascular tier), per program pricing and a 2019 JAMA study of 46 packages.
- That JAMA study found these programs frequently include tests with insufficient USPSTF evidence (hearing exams, ECGs) or that USPSTF recommends against — while none of the 46 packages studied included low-dose CT lung cancer screening, the single highest-evidence cancer screening test available.
- A separate, earlier New England Journal of Medicine piece argued executive physicals fail on three counts: efficacy, cost, and equity — a criticism from within the medical establishment, not from a competitor.
- Insurance billing varies enormously: Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic bill a portion of services; Johns Hopkins and Massachusetts General Hospital are self-pay only.
- These programs are the older, hospital-based counterpart to venture-backed longevity clinics like Fountain Life — worth comparing directly if you’re choosing between the two models.
Quick Verdict
- Best for the deepest institutional track record: Cooper Clinic (Dallas) — the program that effectively invented modern preventive medicine research, running since 1970.
- Best if you want insurance to cover part of it: Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic, both of which can bill a portion of clinical services, unlike several peers on this list.
- Best value entry point: UCLA’s Comprehensive Health Program, with packages starting around $1,200 — the lowest of the seven.
- Most expensive, most comprehensive: Cleveland Clinic’s premium cardiovascular tier, up to $25,000.
- Who should pause before booking any of them: anyone assuming a hospital’s brand name guarantees every included test is backed by strong evidence. The JAMA data below says otherwise, at multiple top-ranked institutions.
Comparison Table
| Program | Price (as of 2026) | Duration | Locations | Insurance billing | Scale / history |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mayo Clinic Executive Health Program | From ~$5,000 | 1–3 days, personalized itinerary | Rochester MN, Scottsdale AZ, Jacksonville FL | Bills majority of clinical services; concierge fee typically self-pay | One of the most recognized academic medical brands in the world |
| Cleveland Clinic Executive Health | $3,000–$25,000 depending on tier | 1 day (standard) to multi-day (premium) | Ohio, Florida | Partial billing; most heavily insurance-restricted portions are self-pay | Large multi-site academic health system |
| Cooper Clinic (Cooper Aerobics, Dallas) | From ~$2,500 | 1 day | Dallas, TX | Self-pay | Founded 1970 by Dr. Kenneth Cooper; 265,000+ exams for 100,000+ people to date |
| Johns Hopkins Executive & Preventive Health | $4,500–$10,000 | 1 day | Baltimore, MD | Self-pay only; does not bill insurance | Academic medical center, Johns Hopkins Medicine |
| Mount Sinai Executive Health Program | From ~$4,000 | 1 day | New York, NY | Varies; largely self-pay | Manhattan-based academic medical center program |
| UCLA Comprehensive Health Program | $1,200–$5,500 (Executive Plus tier) | Half-day to 1 day | Los Angeles, CA | Partial billing available | UCLA Health system |
| Massachusetts General Hospital Executive Health | ~$6,000/year (concierge membership model) | Ongoing membership, not single visit | Boston, MA | Cannot bill insurance for any portion | Harvard-affiliated academic medical center |
Prices reflect publicly available information as of mid-2026, cited individually in the Sources section. Most programs quote pricing on request rather than publishing a fixed rate card — confirm current pricing directly before booking.
Before paying $2,500+ for a hospital checkup, see what's already guideline-recommended for your age and risk profile — often at a fraction of the cost. Answer a few quick, non-identifying questions and get personalized eligibility guidance across all 6 categories ScanGlean covers. Take the Fit Check →
The 7 Programs, One at a Time
Mayo Clinic Executive Health Program
Mayo’s program is built around a personalized 1-to-3-day itinerary — the length and content depend on your medical history and what your physician flags as worth investigating further. Beyond the medical testing, the executive fee covers concierge-level logistics: a private lounge, fast-tracked lab results, prioritized specialist consults, and travel/lodging coordination. Mayo can bill the majority of clinical services to insurance, which sets it apart from several peers on this list — though the concierge fee itself is typically a separate, self-pay charge.
Cleveland Clinic Executive Health
Cleveland Clinic offers the widest published price range of the seven, from a roughly $3,000 standard executive exam up to $25,000 for premium tiers built around extensive cardiovascular imaging. Like Mayo, insurance covers a portion of clinical services, but Cleveland Clinic is explicit that many components of the higher-tier packages are billed directly to the patient, per a pricing breakdown from Plotline Health.
Cooper Clinic (Dallas)
Cooper Clinic isn’t just an executive physical provider — it’s arguably the birthplace of the entire preventive-medicine research field. Dr. Kenneth Cooper founded The Cooper Institute in 1970 (the same Dr. Cooper who coined the term “aerobics”), and Cooper Clinic has since run more than 265,000 exams for over 100,000 people, building one of the longest-running preventive health datasets in the country. Pricing starts around $2,500, at the lower end of the seven programs compared here, and the clinic is self-pay.
Johns Hopkins Executive & Preventive Health
Johns Hopkins’ program runs $4,500 to $10,000 and is explicitly structured as self-pay — the program does not bill or collect from health insurance plans for any part of the visit, a notable contrast to Mayo and Cleveland Clinic.
Mount Sinai Executive Health Program
Mount Sinai’s Manhattan-based program starts around $4,000, with pricing customized based on which services are selected. Like several peers here, most of the program is billed directly to the patient rather than through insurance.
UCLA Comprehensive Health Program
UCLA offers the widest accessible entry point of the seven, with basic packages starting around $1,200 and its top “Executive Plus” tier — a full physical, extensive testing, follow-up consultation, and car service — priced at $5,500. Some portions of the program can be billed to insurance, which UCLA discloses more explicitly than most peers.
Massachusetts General Hospital Executive Health
Mass General’s program is structured differently from the rest of this list: rather than a single-day exam, it’s positioned as an ongoing concierge primary care membership, at roughly $6,000 per year, covering preventive care, screening, and enhanced access to your physician. Mass General is explicit that it cannot bill insurance or provide claims documentation for any part of the service.
What a JAMA Study Found When It Actually Checked the Evidence
This is the section that separates this article from every other “best executive health programs” roundup, most of which are written by hospitals, longevity clinics, or affiliate sites with something to sell you.
In 2019, Deborah Korenstein, Maha Mamoor, and Peter B. Bach — physician-researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center — published an analysis in JAMA that did something remarkably simple and, until then, apparently nobody had done: they took the U.S. News & World Report list of the 50 top-ranked hospitals in the country, checked which ones offered executive physical programs, and compared exactly what those programs included against USPSTF evidence grades for each service.
Of the 50 hospitals, 32 (64%) offered an executive physical program. Detailed package information was available for 29 institutions, covering 46 distinct packages priced from $1,700 to $10,000. What they contained, checked against USPSTF’s own evidence grades, was not flattering:
| Finding | Detail |
|---|---|
| Hearing exams included | 83% of programs — USPSTF grade “I” (insufficient evidence to assess benefit/harm) |
| Electrocardiograms (ECG) included | 83% of programs — USPSTF grade “I” |
| Services graded “D” (recommended against) | Included across multiple packages |
| Grade “A” services (strong evidence) included | Only cervical cytology (Pap test), for applicable patients |
| Low-dose CT lung cancer screening included | None of the 46 packages — despite being the single USPSTF grade “A” cancer screening test with the strongest mortality-reduction evidence available |
The researchers’ own conclusion was blunt: prestigious hospitals’ inclusion of insufficient-evidence and even recommended-against services in a premium-priced program risks being read by patients as an implicit endorsement of those tests’ value, and the overall pattern “may promote excessive, low-value care.”
Put plainly: the single most effective, most evidence-backed cancer screening test in the entire American preventive-medicine toolkit — the one specifically indicated for long-term heavy smokers, per USPSTF — was absent from every package studied, while lower-value tests like routine ECGs and hearing exams showed up in the overwhelming majority of them. That’s not a knock on any one hospital by name; the study didn’t find one bad actor, it found a pattern across nearly every program it examined.
This Isn’t a New Concern
The JAMA study wasn’t the first time a physician raised this alarm from inside the profession. In 2008, Dr. Brian Rank, medical director of HealthPartners Medical Group, wrote a New England Journal of Medicine perspective piece bluntly titled “Executive Physicals — Bad Medicine on Three Counts.” His argument, more than a decade before the JAMA data existed to back it up empirically, was structural:
- Efficacy — more tests and a longer visit don’t automatically mean better medicine. Rank specifically flagged cardiac imaging like CT heart scans as “rarely meaningful as a predictor of disease” in this context.
- Cost — expensive packages reinforce a false “costlier is better” impression of medical care, one that doesn’t hold up against the actual evidence for most included tests.
- Equity — Rank argued that a system funneling extensive, low-value testing toward the wealthiest and most senior patients runs directly against broader efforts to reduce healthcare disparities based on income, race, and geography.
Two independent critiques, eleven years apart, from physicians inside the medical establishment rather than outside critics — one structural, one empirical — arriving at a similar place: the executive physical model has a real, persistent evidence problem that isn’t specific to any one hospital.
This dovetails with a pattern ScanGlean has covered before: a 2019 Cochrane review of more than 251,000 people found that general, comprehensive health checks — regardless of how they’re packaged or priced — have little or no effect on all-cause, cancer, or cardiovascular mortality, as we cover in our full evidence review of preventive scans. The executive physical is a premium, concierge-wrapped version of exactly the model that review examined.
Executive Health Programs vs. Venture-Backed Longevity Clinics
If you’ve read our comparison of Fountain Life, Human Longevity, Superpower, and Next Health, the parallel here should be obvious — these are two different eras of the same basic pitch.
- History and staffing. Hospital executive health programs are decades old (Cooper Clinic since 1970) and staffed by the same board-certified physicians treating the hospital’s general patient population. Venture-backed longevity clinics are mostly under a decade old and often staffed through a mix of employed physicians and outside contractors.
- What’s included. Hospital programs center on physical exams, labs, and imaging within conventional medical specialties. Longevity clinics more often add whole genome sequencing, proprietary “biological age” scores, and wellness add-ons (IV therapy, supplements) that sit further from established clinical practice.
- Insurance. Several hospital programs (Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, UCLA) can bill at least part of the visit to insurance. None of the four longevity clinics in our other comparison offer any insurance billing at all.
- Evidence. Neither category has been shown, in a controlled trial, to reduce mortality as a bundled product. But the hospital model has at least been subjected to the kind of rigorous, independent, peer-reviewed scrutiny (the JAMA and NEJM pieces above) that most venture-backed longevity clinics haven’t yet received.
- Price ceiling. Hospital programs top out around $25,000 (Cleveland Clinic’s premium tier); the newest longevity clinics run as high as $85,000/year (Fountain Life’s EPIC tier).
Neither model is simply “better” — they’re both susceptible to the same core problem the JAMA study identified: testing that’s broad rather than targeted, sold on comprehensiveness and prestige rather than on which specific tests actually change your outcome.
Who Should Actually Consider an Executive Health Program
As with every comparison on this site, we’re not telling you to book one or skip one — that’s a decision for you and a physician who knows your history. What we can offer is the filter worth applying first.
- Which specific tests are in the package I’m buying, and does each one carry a USPSTF grade A or B for someone with my age, sex, and risk profile — or is it there because it sounds thorough?
- Is a genuinely high-value test conspicuously missing — the JAMA study’s clearest finding was that low-dose CT lung screening, the single best-evidenced cancer screening test available, was absent from every package studied. Ask directly whether it’s offered if you’re a current or former heavy smoker in the eligible age range.
- What portion is billable to insurance, and what portion is a flat concierge fee regardless of what’s found?
- Would my own primary care physician order these same tests if I asked, based on my actual risk factors — or is a large share of this package generic and not personalized to me at all?
- Am I paying primarily for the tests, or for the experience (private lounge, same-day results, a nicer waiting room)? Both have value, but they’re different things, and it’s worth knowing which one you’re actually buying.
Cost Reality
- The quoted price is often a starting point, not a ceiling. Several of these programs (Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins) explicitly customize pricing based on which tests and consults are added — the number on a pricing page is frequently a floor.
- Insurance billing is inconsistent and often partial. Even at institutions that can bill insurance, the concierge or facility fee is typically separate and self-pay, and coverage depends heavily on your specific plan.
- Follow-up isn’t always included. As with any broad screening approach, an indeterminate finding can trigger additional imaging, specialist referrals, or biopsies billed separately from the original program fee.
- Annual repetition is baked into the value proposition. Mass General’s model makes this explicit by charging annually as a membership; most other programs implicitly assume you’ll return yearly, which means the real multi-year cost is the quoted price times however many years you continue.
The Bottom Line
Hospital executive health programs are the original version of what venture-backed longevity clinics are selling today — decades of institutional history, real board-certified physicians, and in several cases, partial insurance billing that no startup in this space currently offers. That history is a genuine point in their favor. It is not, per the best available evidence, proof that the specific bundle of tests inside any given program is well-chosen. A 2019 JAMA study of the country’s most prestigious hospitals found a consistent pattern of low-value, insufficient-evidence testing crowding out the single highest-evidence cancer screening test in existence — and a 2008 NEJM piece made a similar structural argument more than a decade earlier. Both critiques came from inside the medical profession, not from a competing product trying to win your business.
The honest takeaway isn’t “skip executive physicals” or “book one blindly.” It’s: ask for the specific test list before you pay, check it against what’s actually indicated for someone with your risk profile, and don’t assume a hospital’s reputation is a substitute for that conversation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an executive health program?
An executive health program is a comprehensive, single- or multi-day preventive checkup offered by a hospital or academic medical center, bundling extensive lab testing, imaging, and specialist consultations into one concierge-style visit. They originated in the 1970s as a corporate perk for senior executives and are now sold directly to any self-pay patient, typically for $1,700 to $25,000.
How much does an executive physical cost?
A 2019 JAMA study of 46 packages at 29 top-ranked US hospitals found prices ranging from $1,700 to $10,000. At the high end, programs with extensive cardiac imaging or multi-day itineraries (like Cleveland Clinic’s premium packages) can run up to $25,000. Most well-known academic medical center programs fall between $2,500 and $6,000 for a standard one-day exam.
Is an executive physical worth it?
The evidence is genuinely mixed and more critical than most people assume. A 2019 JAMA study found that executive physicals at top-ranked hospitals frequently include services USPSTF rates as having insufficient evidence (like routine ECGs and hearing exams) or actively recommends against, while none of the 46 packages studied included low-dose CT lung cancer screening — the single highest-evidence cancer screening test that exists. Whether it’s worth it depends heavily on which specific tests you’re getting, not the program’s reputation or price.
What’s included in the Mayo Clinic Executive Health Program?
Mayo Clinic’s program is a personalized 1-to-3-day itinerary of preventive exams, tests, and specialist consults tailored to your medical history, combined with concierge amenities (private lounge, fast-tracked labs, prioritized specialist access). Pricing starts around $5,000, and Mayo can bill the majority of clinical services to insurance, though the concierge fee itself typically is not covered.
Do executive health programs take insurance?
It varies significantly by hospital. Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic can bill a portion of clinical services to insurance, though the executive/concierge fee is usually separate and self-pay. Johns Hopkins and Massachusetts General Hospital’s executive health programs are explicitly self-pay only and do not bill insurance at all for any part of the visit.
What’s the difference between an executive health program and a longevity clinic like Fountain Life?
Executive health programs are older (some dating to the 1970s), hospital-affiliated, staffed by the same board-certified physicians who treat the general patient population, and usually don’t include genomic sequencing or biological age testing. Venture-backed longevity clinics like Fountain Life or Human Longevity are newer, add whole genome sequencing and proprietary “health scores,” often cost more at the top tier, and — per a 2025 analysis by physician-scientist Eric Topol — have generally published less independent outcomes data than some academic medical centers have.
Does research show executive physicals actually catch important health problems?
Individual cases of early detection do happen and get widely publicized. But no controlled study has shown that executive physicals, as a category, reduce mortality or serious illness better than guideline-based primary care. The same 2019 JAMA analysis that examined test selection also builds on a broader body of evidence — including a 2019 Cochrane review of over 251,000 people — finding that general comprehensive health checks do not reduce all-cause, cancer, or cardiovascular mortality.
Which executive health program has the best evidence behind it?
None of the seven programs compared here has published data showing its specific package reduces mortality or serious disease. What varies is how closely each program’s included tests track USPSTF guidelines versus running low-value or insufficient-evidence tests for their own sake — and the JAMA study suggests this is inconsistent even among the most prestigious hospitals, not a simple matter of picking the most famous name.
This article is for general educational and informational purposes only. It is not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for diagnosis, treatment, or guidance from a licensed physician or other qualified healthcare provider. Pricing and program details referenced in this article reflect our research as of mid-2026 and are subject to change — see our Methodology page for how we research, grade, and update comparisons like this one. This article does not constitute a personal recommendation to use or avoid any specific program. Always consult a clinician before making decisions about screening, testing, or your health.
Disclosure
ScanGlean does not sell scans, panels, or memberships, and we currently have no paid, affiliate, or referral relationship with Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Cooper Clinic, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Mount Sinai, UCLA Health, or Massachusetts General Hospital. If that changes for any provider we cover, it will be disclosed here and on our Methodology page, and it will never influence a program’s evidence grade or ranking.
Sources
- Korenstein D, Mamoor M, Bach PB. Preventive Services Offered in Executive Physicals at Top-Ranked Hospitals. JAMA, 2019;322(11):1101–1103. doi:10.1001/jama.2019.10563.
- Rank B. Executive Physicals — Bad Medicine on Three Counts. New England Journal of Medicine, 2008;359(2):104–105.
- Krogsbøll LT, Jørgensen KJ, Gøtzsche PC. General health checks in adults for reducing morbidity and mortality from disease. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2019.
- Mayo Clinic. Executive Health Program, accessed 2026.
- Cleveland Clinic. Executive Health, accessed 2026.
- Plotline Health. Executive Health Program Cost: A Full Breakdown, 2026.
- Cooper Aerobics. Executive Health, Cooper Clinic Dallas, accessed 2026.
- Johns Hopkins Medicine. Executive & Preventive Health, accessed 2026.
- UCLA Health. Comprehensive Health Program — Executive Physicals, accessed 2026.
- Massachusetts General Hospital. Executive Health Services, accessed 2026.
- Topol E. The Business of Promoting Longevity and Healthspan. Ground Truths (Substack), March 22, 2025.