U.S. opens UnitedHealth antitrust probe

Re:U.S. opens UnitedHealth antitrust probe by nradov on Wednesday February 28, 2024 @12:41AM (#39534443)

You appear to have confused payer profit margins with the 80 – 85% minimum medical loss ratio imposed by the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Medical insurance is a low margin business and industry profits have never been anywhere near 20%.

https://www.cms.gov/marketplace/private-health-insurance/med...

For the past quarter, the UnitedHealthcare business unit of UnitedHealth Group had a profit margin of 6.6%.

https://www.sec.gov/ixviewer/ix.html?doc=/Archives/edgar/dat...

The business is still highly competitive, and payers have limited ability to raise premiums due to push back from employers.

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Re:U.S. opens UnitedHealth antitrust probe by TheOtherHobbes on Wednesday February 28, 2024 @07:14AM (#39536894)

You're confusing the insurance industry with the health industry. When you have the same companies owning hospital chains and insurance, they can easily pretend to be a low profit industry.

The industry as a whole is insanely profitable. Revenue is $1.4 trillion. It posts profits of around $650bn. Which means on average it extracts around $2000 of profit from every single person in the US, with an average individual healthcare spend of more than $4000.

The profit is in the ballpark of the entire US defence budget, at around $750bn.

Healthcare is a huge boat anchor drag on the entire economy.

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Re:U.S. opens UnitedHealth antitrust probe by gruez on Wednesday February 28, 2024 @07:31AM (#39537032)

>The industry as a whole is insanely profitable. Revenue is $1.4 trillion. It posts profits of around $650bn. Which means on average it extracts around $2000 of profit from every single person in the US, with an average individual healthcare spend of more than $4000.

Source for these numbers? 0.65 billion in profits on 1.4 billion in revenue is an insane margin

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