UHC's Mid-Year Panic Attack

UnitedHealth just laid out its plan for survival and it reads like a ransom note to patients. Wall Street hates their margins. Profits dipped from $15.8 billion last year to $14.3 billion this quarter. Their fix: raise premiums in the double digits, slash benefits, purge 600,000 members, and cut providers out of networks. Translation: patients, employers, and taxpayers get squeezed so shareholders can sleep at night.

The worst part is how normal this feels. A company with $84 billion in Medicare Advantage overpayments still cries poverty. Congress shrugs. Employers pass costs to workers. Doctors drown in paperwork while UnitedHealth becomes the largest employer of doctors in the country. And patients, the ones supposedly “valued,” get fewer options and higher bills every single year.

This is the cycle. Squeeze patients until they skip care. They get sicker. They hit the ER. Costs spike. Wall Street panics. Repeat. The only “value-based care” happening here is value for investors.

Why do we tolerate it? Would we accept a car that got worse every year but cost twice as much? Or a phone with fewer features every time you upgraded?

Health insurance is the one product in America that reliably gets worse while becoming unaffordable to own.

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SOURCE ➡️ https://open.substack.com/pub/healthcareuncovered/p/inside-the-midyear-panic-at-unitedhealth