Mr. Clarkson of the Kaiser Family Foundation said, “As the baby boom population ages, people are leaving their workplace health care plans, which have been steady and profitable for the managed care companies
but aren’t growing, and going on Medicare in big numbers, and companies like UnitedHealth see this as an opportunity.”
Direct government premiums from Medicaid and Medicare amount to 25 percent of UnitedHealth’s revenue,
and the company is moving rapidly into other areas: In January, it announced the $2.3 billion purchase of Surgical Care Affiliates, an outpatient surgery chain, as part of an aggressive move to provide direct medical services.
“The successful managed care companies, and UnitedHealth in particular, have figured out how to prosper in almost any environment — and to insulate themselves from issues
that become a problem,” said Gary Claxton, director of the health care marketplace project for the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to health care policy.
Those losses have cumulatively swelled to more than $1 billion, Ms. Skolnick said,
but because they have been segregated in the company’s accounting, and because the company has been leaving those markets, investors have been able to easily assess the company’s value “entirely separately from the problems it’s had with the exchanges,” she said.
Gripes About Obamacare Aside, Health Insurers Are in a Profit Spiral -
Over the last few years, big managed care companies like UnitedHealth Group have contributed to the furor
over the fate of the Affordable Care Act by saying that important parts of it are fundamentally flawed.
Since March 2010, when the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, the managed care companies within the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index — UnitedHealth, Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, Humana
and Centene — have risen far more than the overall stock index.