This is the first in a periodic series about how UnitedHealth Group wields its unrivaled physician empire to boost its profits and expand its influence.
UnitedHealth Group started out as a small, Minnesota health insurance company and has since morphed into a modern-day Standard Oil, exerting unmatched dominance over health care in the United States.
It’s no secret that UnitedHealth is a colossus: It’s the country’s largest health insurer and the fourth-largest company of any type by revenue, just behind Apple. And thanks to a series of stealthy deals, almost 1 in 10 U.S. doctors — some 90,000 clinicians — now either work for UnitedHealth or are under its influence, more than any major clinic chain or hospital system.
But behind those statistics, there’s a lot UnitedHealth doesn’t want you to know. A STAT investigation reveals the untold story of how the company has gobbled up multiple pieces of the health care industry and exploited its growing power to milk the system for profit. UnitedHealth’s tactics have transformed medicine in communities across the country into an assembly line that treats millions of patients as products to be monetized.
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