United’s financial challenges alone are tricky. Its health plans that manage care for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, in particular, could be facing big funding cuts due to Trump administration changes, said Jonathan Weiner, a health policy and management professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“This is not an easy time,” Weiner said.
The killing of Brian Thompson, who ran the massive UnitedHealthcare health insurance business nested within the parent company, unleashed a wave of public anger at the health insurance industry. The ire has focused on United for two key reasons: its status as the nation’s largest health insurer and the limited availability of data about claims denials, leaving it open to interpretation.
Hemsley faces significant challenges, including the company’s internal culture in the wake of this hostility and its reputation among patients and health care providers, said Dr. Archelle Georgiou, UnitedHealth’s former chief medical officer who worked with Hemsley from the 1990s through 2007.
“I think that they have been tone deaf in the response to the marketplace’s anger at how challenging it is to work with United,” Georgiou said.
The company has used its strength to get what it wants in the market, thereby becoming hard to work with for patients and health care providers, she added. Negative perceptions have grown as “strength has turned into arrogance, and I think that gets in the way of innovation and collaboration.”