Shares in UnitedHealth slumped by 10% following the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson on 4 December. Many people were “indifferent” to the assassination, with the group’s business practices in the spotlight instead. Some lambasted the group for “placing greater emphasis on their bottom line [than] providing quality coverage to its insurees”. Some investors worry that UnitedHealth “will see reduced customer loyalty, resulting in worse financial performance”.
It’s not only UnitedHealth, which saw its market capitalisation fall by $55 billion, that is facing pressure, says Forbes’ Derek Saul. There has been a wider sell-off in health insurance shares with a range of companies, such as Elevance Health, Cigna, Centene and Humana all losing ground. The fear seems to be that the anti-insurer sentiment expressed by the public may pressure the industry “to adjust how they handle coverage decisions”. If companies don’t, they know that they might eventually “face the wrath of the public” in the form of increased regulation.
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For now, most analysts still expect the new administration to focus on “traditional Republican priorities”, such as trying to shift more patients into the privately administered programme known as Medicare Advantage, says David Wainer in The Wall Street Journal.
Overall, something is very wrong with the US healthcare system, says Robert Cyran for Breakingviews – “only 5% of respondents ranked the services provided by health insurers as excellent in a 2023 Gallup poll, with about a third classifying them as poor”.
What’s more, despite the US spending $12,000 per head on healthcare, 2.5 times the average for countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Americans still have “a lower life expectancy than most countries in the bloc”. Insurance premiums and out-of-pocket spending by individuals have also risen above inflation, with the US “spending more money and time on insurance, administration, patient paperwork, cost disputes and bickering over insurer approval for treatments”.
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