Optum: Testing Time for an Invisible Empire

By Jeff Goldsmith Years ago, the largest living thing in the world was thought to be the blue whale. Then someone discovered that the largest living thing in the world was actually the 106 acre, 47 thousand tree Pando aspen grove in central Utah, which genetic testing revealed to be a single organism. With its enormous network of underground roots and symbiotic relationship with a vast ecosystem of fungi, that aspen grove is a great metaphor for UnitedHealth Group. United, whose revenues amount to more than 8% of the US health system, is the largest healthcare enterprise in the world. The root system of UHG is a vast and poorly understood subsidiary called Optum. At $226 billion annual revenues, Optum is the largest healthcare business in the US that no-one knows anything about. Optum by itself has revenues that are a little less than 5% of total US healthcare spending. An ill-starred Optum subsidiary, Change Healthcare, which suffered a catastrophic $100 billion cyberattack on February 21, 2024 that put most of the US health system on life support, put its parent company Optum in the headlines. But Change Healthcare is a tiny (less than 2%) piece of this vast new (less than twenty years old) healthcare enterprise. If it were freestanding, Optum would be the 12th largest company in the US: identical in size to Costco and slightly larger than Microsoft. Optum’s topline revenues are almost four times larger than HCA, the nation’s largest ho...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Policy Health Tech Jeff Goldsmith Optum PBMs United HealthGroup Source Type: blogs