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The Justice Division has launched an antitrust investigation into UnitedHealth Group, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing individuals with information of the matter.
Investigators have in latest weeks been interviewing healthcare trade representatives in sectors the place UnitedHealth competes, together with physician teams, the report stated.
Throughout their interviews, investigators have requested about points together with sure relationships between the corporate’s UnitedHealthcare insurance coverage unit and its Optum health-services-arm, which owns doctor teams, amongst different belongings.
UnitedHealth’s unit, Optum Well being, provides a variety of healthcare options, from pharmacy profit administration to monetary session and psychological well being assist.
Individuals are going through hovering healthcare prices, with the estimated healthcare spending per particular person standing at about $13,493 in 2022, based on federal knowledge launched late final yr.
The Biden administration has made decreasing drug costs a precedence. It handed the primary US drug pricing laws ever within the Inflation Reduction Act final yr, and has since turned its sights on pharmacy profit supervisor middlemen.
Lawmakers and the Federal Commerce Fee have been investigating the role of these middlemen in rising healthcare costs. A number of payments have been within the works since final yr that will require them to make their enterprise dealings public, together with the charges they earn on transactions.
The WSJ additionally reported that the DOJ is analyzing the corporate’s Medicare billing practices to see if docs are aggressively characterizing their sufferers sicknesses to wrongly improve funds from the federal government.
Investigators have requested about doable impacts of the corporate’s doctor-group acquisitions on rivals and shoppers, the WSJ report stated, citing the individuals.
The corporate additionally competes with CVS Well being and Cigna that supply medical insurance plans together with pharmacy profit administration (PBM) companies.
The DOJ has beforehand sued to cease UnitedHealth Group’s acquisition of Change Healthcare in February 2022, however accomplished the buyout later that yr.
An outage as a result of a cybersecurity attack at billing and data systems provider Change Healthcare has brought about disruptions throughout healthcare companies in the US since final week.
The DOJ declined to remark, whereas UnitedHealth didn’t instantly reply to a Reuters request for remark.
Shares of the corporate closed down 2.3%.
On Monday, Examiner Media reported, citing an inside e-mail, that UnitedHealth obtained a discover from the DOJ in October final yr, saying it had begun a “private antitrust investigation into the corporate.”
