For insurers like UnitedHealth Group and Cigna, the road to ever-larger profits increasingly leads through anything but health insurance. A host of earnings reports in recent weeks reinforce how much pharmacy, physician networks and other non-core products are driving the bottom lines of health behemoths with big insurance units — a situation that is grabbing the attention of regulators and Congress. There’s been a race among health insurers to merge, acquire or otherwise align with other parts of the health care ecosystem to boost profits and take advantage of their sheer number of connections within the system to drive down costs.
Read the full article: Insurers’ Big Profits Stem from Care Delivery, Not Core Business //
Source: https://www.axios.com/2024/08/08/insurer-profits-health-care-delivery-pharmacy