Bloom is Off the Rose at UnitedHealth Group
A Forty Year Growth Saga is Coming to an End After market close Wednesday April 16, UnitedHealth Group reported its First Quarter 2025 earnings. UNH missed their expected 1Q earnings by 9 cents a share, but the firm also lowered its full year 2025 earnings estimate by 12%. On Thursday opening, investors reacted with an […]
Hospital Mergers Kill
An Economist’s Exercise in Reality Distortion In late June, 2024, two economists, Zarek Brot-Goldberg and Zack Cooper, from the University of Chicago and Yale respectively, released an economic analysis arguing that hospital mergers damage local economies and result in an increase in deaths by suicide and drug overdoses in the markets where mergers occur. Funded by Arnold Ventures their […]
The Clinical Enterprise is the Beating Heart of Health Systems
As health systems struggle to emerge from the post-COVID financial crisis, the importance of the clinical enterprise to these systems has dramatically increased. Healthcare organizations are getting larger, as failing enterprises are absorbed into growing systems. Yet clinicians of all stripes but particularly physicians feel a deepening sense of alienation from the expanding care systems […]
What the Health System Can Expect from a Second Trump Term
Health Policy as a Weapon in the Culture War Though the results of the November election are by no means a foregone conclusion, it is worth thinking about how a second Trump administration might affect the nation’s $4.7 trillion health system. People were not the problem with the first Trump term; his healthcare team was […]
The Real Red Wave: Why the Biden Presidency is in Peril
Democrats’ despair after Joe Biden’s pallid and halting debate performance stems from the realization that the uphill climb needed to prevent the return of Donald Trump might be too steep. What is less obvious is the awareness of the urban intelligentsia of the root causes of the adverse political climate, which can be seen in […]