Industry Control

We’ve been sounding the alarm for quite some time now: Rural hospitals struggled before COVID-19. They barely held on during the pandemic. And if private health plans continue to slash reimbursements, rural… Read More

Break out the popcorn for this one.   According to a recent article in HealthLeaders, UnitedHealthcare has found itself in yet another legal battle. United is no stranger to being sued and at… Read More

The separation of a Maine hospital from one of the nation’s biggest health insurers speaks to an overarching pattern: the unending blame game of health insurers.

For health insurers, the Medicare Advantage (MA) cup is definitely not half empty. In fact, the cups runneth over as insurance companies seem to squeeze as much as they can from the… Read More

Health insurance is a tricky business. In most lines of work, you can’t just say one thing and then do another. But as it turns out, if you’re a big enough insurance… Read More

If healthcare were real estate, UnitedHealth Group owns the whole block. They just don’t want you to know that. According to a March 17th article in the Minnesota newspaper The Star Tribune,… Read More

Big Health Insurer continues to speed around the Monopoly board – passing GO, speeding past Park Place, and disengaging the brakes towards their intended win. We covered the continued rise of concentrated… Read More

Health insurance companies would like you to believe that hospitals – despite being filled with folks dedicated to saving lives – are not on the side of patients. They’d like you to believe that… Read More

Telebehavioral health has become critical in providing global access to mental and behavioral health services. While telebehavioral health is not new by any means, it’s experienced an explosion of growth since the… Read More

Welcome to the Players Club…of insurers, that is, and the alliances and partnerships are only getting more complex. Per a recent article in Axios, Cigna has invested $750 million into Bright Health,… Read More

Insurance companies sure found plenty of creative ways to make money in 2021. Some we expected, some were new, and many made it harder for patients to access the healthcare services they… Read More

Pharmacy business managers (PBMs) control the cost of prescriptions for patients. This might sound like a good thing – theoretically, by monitoring prescription costs, PBMs are supposed to increase access to necessary… Read More

Surprise bills, be gone! Spooky season may be over, but the holiday season is here, and we still hope there’s some magic left in the air to rid patients of surprise bills… Read More

We’ve said it before: Optum is getting bigger. A subsidiary of UnitedHealthcare, Optum has inked its largest health system deal yet, Healthcare Dive reports. After another successful quarter (if you’re a shareholder,… Read More

Big Appliance. Big Oil. Big Dairy. Big Pharma. Annnnnd Big Health Insurer. Not that we needed more evidence to prove the big business of health insurance, but a recent article in Modern… Read More

Finally, at (very) long last, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is putting the many pieces of Medicare fraud together. An exclusive report in the Wall Street Journal explains that… Read More

Word on the street (StreetInsider, to be specific) is that Humana has its eye on a shiny new purchase: Medicaid managed-care organization (MCO), Centene. A recent Fierce Healthcare article gives us the… Read More

Change is a-coming, as it normally does during a new legislative year. This year, Congress is mid-debate on Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill and Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, which includes Medicare reform.… Read More

Storm preparation is a major priority for many cities across the nation, and rightly so. But where’s the preparation for healthcare “storms,” like COVID-19? Mississippi has what’s believed to be the weakest… Read More

When a football game goes into overtime, it’s exciting, competitive, and generally applauded. But when enforcement of health insurer transparency goes into overtime, it’s frustrating, exhausting, and costly. Per a recent Fierce… Read More

You can always count on the American Hospital Association (AHA) to address red flags from insurers, namely, UnitedHealthcare. Thumbs. Up. AHA’s latest effort involves a letter addressed to the Department of Justice… Read More

We’re hearing a bit more than crickets from Cigna. According to a Modern Healthcare article, Cigna and Blue Shield of California participated in a $83.5M funding round for Cricket Health, a software… Read More

It’s common knowledge at this point – insurers made a killing last year due to the pandemic. Limited care led to fewer medical claims, which led to more dollars in insurers’ pockets.… Read More

UnitedHealthcare’s profits seem to correlate with how much control they have over the industry, and according to a July 16 article in Axios, it’s more than we previously thought.