UnitedHealth shares slump — is the US healthcare industry in trouble?

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.

Thompson appears to have become “a proxy for the healthcare industry writ large”, says Bloomberg’s Lisa Jarvis. The big question is whether this rage is channelled into something useful, at a time when the incoming Trump administration “seems keen to find cuts in ways that will directly harm Americans’ access to care, whether by making insurance less affordable or through deep cuts to Medicaid”.

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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.

However, even under Trump, Republicans could be willing to pursue greater scrutiny on certain practices by insurers such as the requirement for a doctor to secure approval before providing a service, which the Biden administration had already “begun cracking down on”. At the very least, insurance executives could be forced to “tread more carefully when it comes to denying medical claims” in future.

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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