UnitedHealth Group reports flat first-quarter profits

Giant UnitedHealth Group is still struggling to show signs of recovery from last year’s sharp profit decline, even as the company reported first-quarter earnings on Tuesday that beat Wall Street’s expectations.

The company’s profits were relatively flat year-over-year, reflecting UnitedHealth Group’s difficulties in dealing with rising medical costs, government scrutiny of its billing practices and the public’s ongoing general distrust of health insurers. It is the first of the major for-profit insurers to report results for the first quarter of 2026, signaling the potential for a continuation of industry-wide challenges.

The company reported operating profit of $9 billion on revenue of $112 billion for the first three months of 2026, consistent with first quarter 2025 results. Total sales last year were $448 billion.

United slightly raised its 2026 earnings outlook to above $17.35 per share.

UnitedHealth, once one of the most highly valued and respected companies in the country, posted sharply lower results last spring, causing the company’s stock price to plummet. The stock lost almost half of its value within a few months.

The company suddenly replaced its chairman and brought back Stephen Hemsley, a former CEO who promised to cycle through all of the company’s divisions and return it to double-digit growth.

UnitedHealth has long benefited from the ability to build an unparalleled range of healthcare companies, from the nation’s largest health insurer to giant data companies to medical practices and pharmacy services.

The company owns UnitedHealthcare, the insurer that pays for care for 49 million people, and is one of the largest sellers of plans for Medicare Advantage, the private Medicare plans that now cover health care for about half of beneficiaries who are 65 or older or have a disability. The Company operates Optum, which provides medical care through a large network of approximately 90,000 affiliated physicians. Its massive pharmacy benefit manager, Optum Rx, manages about 60 million patient prescriptions.

The group also owns Change Healthcare, the clearinghouse that processes more than a third of all U.S. claims to pharmacies, doctors, hospitals and insurers and was the target of a devastating cyberattack.

That vulnerability and United’s outsized influence on so many health care sectors led some lawmakers to call for the company to be broken up.

Since last spring, United’s extensive expansion has largely come to an end. The company is now describing how it is cutting costs – by exiting companies, including some in Britain and elsewhere outside the United States; overhaul of its management team; and abandoning plans in unprofitable markets.

When announcing the company’s results for the first three months of 2026, UnitedHealth executives highlighted these efforts. “We continue to help simplify and modernize healthcare for the people we serve, ensuring greater value, affordability, transparency and connectivity,” Hemsley said in a statement.

One of the biggest setbacks was the demise of the once extremely lucrative Medicare Advantage business. Federal officials have cracked down on the possibility that the plans could overwhelm the government for its services by exaggerating the prevalence of some diagnoses. Some of these practices are still under federal control.

This market has also become less profitable for UnitedHealth as policyholders become sicker and overall medical costs rise. The company said it lost nearly a million customers in the Medicare Advantage market.

And it announced an estimated $6 billion drop in revenue this year based on the U.S. government’s decision to change the way it pays for Medicare Advantage services, including those provided by UnitedHealth and Optum.

United, along with the nation’s other major insurers, has become the target of a wave of anger and frustration from the public and lawmakers, citing the industry’s practice of pre-authorizing some services, leading to delays and denials of necessary care.

In late 2024, top health insurance executive Brian Thompson was shot and killed in midtown Manhattan, a murder that sparked deep public hostility toward insurers.