Through its Optum division health insurer UnitedHealth has 90,000 affiliated doctors. Under the federal government’s Medicare Advantage program, UnitedHealth received higher payments from the federal government for its customers who have more dire diagnoses. This creates an incentive for UnitedHealth to pressure its affiliated doctors to code their patients with dire diagnoses.
(p. A3) UnitedHealth has built a sprawling health services company that shows no sign of slowing down. With annual revenue of $372 billion in 2023, it ranks among the five largest companies in the U.S. on that measure. Its stock, meanwhile, has returned more than 600% in the past decade.
UnitedHealth’s success has been fueled by its expansion beyond insurance as its care delivery and solutions unit Optum steadily acquires a vast array of health services companies, from a pharmacy-benefits manager to specialty pharmacies to doctor groups and surgical centers. Over the past two decades, Optum has spent about $82 billion on nearly 100 acquisitions, according to a tally by Raymond James analysts.
Much like the rest of the U.S. economy, America’s healthcare system has consolidated in recent decades, creating giant hospital systems, chain-owned medical practices and vertically integrated insurance conglomerates. Immense scale can drive efficiencies and reduce the cost of care. But in the highly complex and opaque world of U.S. healthcare, where giant companies always seem to be a step ahead of regulators, it also raises potential conflicts of interest and opportunities to game the system. The benefits of size often flow to those companies, not patients or the employers and taxpayers footing much of the bill.
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A key growth driver for UnitedHealth is Optum’s steady acquisitions of doctor practices. Optum now has ties with 90,000 doctors—about 10% of the country’s physician workforce.
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Much of the vertical integration in the industry has focused on the Medicare Advantage business, the sector’s golden goose. These are the private plans in which the government pays insurers a fixed rate to manage the care of seniors. The sicker the patient, the more the government pays.
In recent years, some insurers’ acquisitions seem targeted at controlling the Medicare coding apparatus. If you control the doctors who code patients, you control how much you get paid, explains Loren Adler, a fellow at the Center on Health Policy at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit research organization. UnitedHealth and other insurers argue that they are simply coding patients according to their risk profile and that they comply with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rules.
But they have been accused of abusing the system by coding patients too aggressively. An investigation by the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services found that Medicare insurers received $9 billion in questionable payments in a single year.
For the full commentary see:
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(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 13, 2024, and has the title “What Happens When Your Insurer Is Also Your Doctor and Your Pharmacist.”)