In a previous data snapshot, membership trends at the big managed-care companies looked good almost across the board, rising anywhere from two to 16 percent. The real story, however, is significantly less rosy. Let’s start with trends in fully-insured health plans offered to employers, the traditional bread-and-butter of mainline health-insurance providers like WellPoint and UnitedHealth...
Health Care Industry Archive
November 2008
Having spent a fair amount of time scratching through the financial statements of the industry’s largest health-insurance companies, I figured it couldn’t hurt to put together a few quick snapshots of how UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint and other giants are faring on a fundamental basis. First up is a simple ranking of insurers by market capitalization — roughly the total value...
Express Scripts data loss linked to extortion — The pharmacy benefits manager said it received an anonymous letter threatening to disclose the personal and prescription records of millions of people unless the company paid an undisclosed sum. Express turned over the information to the FBI and alerted 75 people whose records accompanied the extortion attempt. [Sources: NYT, WSJ] Key...
Kaiser reports big investment losses — The nonprofit managed-care group Kaiser Permanente reported a total loss of $399 million in the third quarter, down from a $654 million profit a year earlier. The biggest problem: A $706 million investment loss in the quarter, which Kaiser didn’t further characterize. Kaiser also reported a slight dip in membership, to 8.6 million from nearly...
Medicare Advantage selling season has slow start — Medicare’s efforts to clamp down on high broker commissions that may have encouraged some agents to churn seniors into new Medicare Advantage plans has slowed the pace of the 2009 selling season. Many providers of the privatized healthcare plans report confusion over how to comply with Medicare’s latest directive on...
The health-insurance business is brutal these days, as I’ve noted on several occasions. (See the end of this post for links to my recent items on the underlying business of the largest U.S. health plans.) Weirdly, though, one insurer seems to be bucking several of the dismal underlying trends that are slowly but surely pulling the sector into the abyss. That company is Aetna. True,...
Cigna’s third-quarter net income may have fallen by more than half last week, but its health-plan operations weren’t largely to blame — in fact, the profitability of its health-insurance business actually rose compared to a year earlier. That fact, though, shouldn’t disguise a slow-motion meltdown in its managed-care business. For starters, Cigna is something of an...
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