Beginning in 2024, four STAT News journalists spent more than a year interviewing dozens of current and former UnitedHealth Group employees.
What they learned is an important story in every market where a health insurance company has a lot of leverage over employers’ health insurance costs. It’s also a story every journalist can use to question health insurers’ motivations when they acquire physician practices, pharmacies, other providers or pharmacy benefit managers.
Reporters also can use the series to learn how large health insurers drive up health care costs that can harm employers and contribute to layoffs, higher unemployment rates, and increased levels of drug and alcohol abuse and suicides.
Bob Herman
Tara Bannow
Lizzy Lawrence
Casey Ross
The STAT News team’s efforts resulted in an award-winning eight-part series that explained how UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest health insurer, used its leverage to acquire physician practices, specialty medical clinics and other provider organizations so that it could dominate multiple health care markets nationwide, STAT News reporter Bob Herman explained in an interview.
The STAT News team of Herman, Tara Bannow, Lizzy Lawrence and Casey Ross shared the bylines on each article that became the “Health Care’s Colossus” series. Published from July 24, 2024, through Aug. 11, 2025, the series won the 2024 George W. Polk Award in the medical reporting category and an Edward R. Murrow award in 2025.
(STAT reporters Casey Ross, Bob Herman, Tara Bannow and Lizzy Lawrence) show how UnitedHealth has turned health care into an assembly line that treats millions of patients as products to be monetized. And they chronicle how the $5 trillion American health care system came to be so broken.”
Rick Berke
Co-founder & executive editor,
STAT News
In an interview, Herman explained that the team’s idea for a multi-part series originated in 2024 following a series he and Ross wrote in 2023 about UnitedHealth’s use of AI. My colleague Karen Blum and I covered that series for AHCJ here: “Stat’s denied by AI series, a model of solid investigative journalism,” and “9 story ideas to cover now about AI-driven algorithm use in health care.”
Acquiring providers drives up income
“We wanted to go beyond the normal headlines about how, for example, United had a massive and growing base of providers,” Herman said. “They owned physician practices, clinics, surgery centers, and they were acquiring more providers.” Early in 2024, the four STAT journalists sought to learn what they could about UnitedHealth Group’s operations, Herman explained.
“At that time, they were arguably one of the largest employers of providers,” he added. “We decided to dig into that angle more deeply.”
They interviewed as many current and former physicians and other professionals who worked for UnitedHealth’s provider division, Optum unit, Herman said.
“After a few months, we realized that one of the big themes was coding,” Herman explained. “Physicians under the auspices of UnitedHealth were a major component of the coding regime that UnitedHealth relied on for profitability.”
Physicians, hospitals, other providers and health insurers use medical coding to identify the diseases and conditions each patient has and that each provider treats. By entering billing codes in patients’ charts, physicians document the care they provide and support reimbursement from insurers.
Looking into Medicare Advantage
The STAT team and many other journalists knew that UnitedHealth had and continues to have a significant presence in the Medicare Advantage (MA) market and that UnitedHealth was employing its physicians to care for seniors enrolled in MA plans, Herman said. Among Medicare members, 55% are enrolled in MA plans, according to this KFF report.
“If you control the physicians, you can control the coding, and you can control how sick your patients look on paper,” Herman explained. “That was becoming burdensome for all the physicians in the Optum universe, and that theme stood out quickly to us.”
In the fall of 2024, the Office of Inspector General of the federal Department of Health and Human Services reported that health insurers serving MA members were adjusting the risk scores of those members to boost revenue using a health risk assessment (HRA).
An HRA is a collection of each patient’s health data and health risks that health insurers, physicians and other providers use to evaluate a patient’s health. HHS pays MA plans more when MA members’ risk scores rise.
In 2023, 20 companies serving MA members generated at least $6 billion in risk-adjusted payments from HRAs and HRA-linked chart reviews of MA enrollees, the OIG showed in this report, “Medicare Advantage: Questionable Use of Health Risk Assessments Continues To Drive Up Payments to Plans by Billions.”
In the report, OIG said, “One top MA company, UnitedHealth Group, Inc., stood out from its peers, especially in its use of in-home HRAs and HRA-linked chart reviews to generate risk-adjusted payments.”
When the OIG published the report, UnitedHealth’s use of in-home health assessments was widely known, Herman explained.
“There was already talk about reforming in-home health risk assessments,” he said. “When we started talking to sources, we knew that would be our issue. And, it would not be just the in-clinic coding, but also the at-home coding. That was the line of reporting that we followed throughout.”
STAT Investigation: Health Care’s Colossus
The first article, “How UnitedHealth harnesses its physician empire to squeeze profits out of patients,” was published July 25, 2024. The remaining seven stories examined physician incentives, reimbursement practices, Medicare Advantage, political scrutiny and other aspects of the company’s business.
- Part 1: “How UnitedHealth harnesses its physician empire to squeeze profits out of patients,” July 25, 2024.
- Part 2: “How UnitedHealth turned a questionable artery-screening program into a gold mine,” Aug. 7, 2024.
- Part 3: “UnitedHealth pledged a hands-off approach after buying a Connecticut medical group. Then it upended how doctors practice,” Aug. 28, 2024.
- Part 4: “Inside UnitedHealth’s strategy to pressure physicians: $10,000 bonuses and a doctor leaderboard,” Oct. 16, 2024.
- Part 5: “UnitedHealth pays its own physician groups considerably more than others, driving up consumer costs and its profits,” Nov. 25, 2024.
- Part 6: “Lawmakers call for curbs on UnitedHealth’s growing empire,” Dec. 23, 2024.
- Part 7: “Under siege after a tragedy, UnitedHealth grapples with fresh security threats and a customer backlash,” Feb. 25, 2025.
- Part 8: “Inside the research machine that helps UnitedHealth protect its Medicare profits,” Aug. 11, 2025.
At the end of 2024, Rick Berke, co-founder and executive editor of STAT News, recorded a video explaining the series. In it, he noted that Bannow, Herman, Lawrence and Ross reviewed thousands of pages of documents, pored over reams of data and convinced dozens of clinicians to speak with them to reveal the untold costs of UnitedHealth’s dominance.
“They show how UnitedHealth has turned health care into an assembly line that treats millions of patients as products to be monetized,” he wrote in an article accompanying the video. “And they chronicle how the $5 trillion American health care system came to be so broken.”
Reporters can keep this comment in mind because health insurers and health systems may focus more on generating increased profits rather than making patients’ care needs their top priority.
Also note that while Bannow, Herman, Lawrence and Ross were publishing their work on Health Care’s Colossus in 2025, a team of journalists at The Wall Street Journal were covering similar stories on UnitedHealthcare at the same time.
In March, we reported on their work: “How Wall Street Journal reporters uncovered Medicare Advantage overbilling.” On the WSJ’s series landing page, Medicare Inc., the journal describes their staff’s work as “an investigation into the secret practices insurers use to pocket billions from Medicare.”
Resources
- “STAT wins third Polk Award for Health Care’s Colossus Series,” Rick Berke, STAT News, Feb. 25, 2025.
- “STAT wins a trove of four National Edward R. Murrow Awards,” Boston Globe Media Communications, Aug. 14, 2025.
