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The February cyberattack on a UnitedHealth Group subsidiary may have exposed the health data of one in three Americans, but the nation’s largest health insurance company by market cap and revenue returned to profitability in the second quarter, beating Wall Street expectations and reporting net income of $4.2 billion.
You might be wondering, How have they moved past that so quickly?
They haven’t, actually. The cyberattack’s impact on UnitedHealth got worse in the second quarter, adding up to a loss of $1.1 billion, compared to the first quarter’s $872 million hit. The company is now expecting the attack on Change Healthcare, the subsidiary that was breached, to cost as much as $2.45 billion this year, Forbes reported, a 53% increase over the high range of an earlier forecast. The company has had to advance payments or lend—interest free—more than $9 billion to providers who couldn’t get insurance approval and payments after the cyberattack. CEO Andrew Witty told analysts on an earnings call that the company was “probably a little overoptimistic three months ago” about how quickly UnitedHealth would recover after the attack.
Even as it picks up the pieces post-hack, other parts of the UnitedHealth empire have more than picked up the slack. Its health services business, Optum, was responsible for most of its second-quarter revenue growth. JPMorgan analyst Lisa Gill wrote that OptumRx, the third-largest pharmacy benefit manager in the US, was a “notable highlight” of the quarter, Bloomberg reported. UnitedHealthcare’s commercial insurance business grew by 2.3 customers, according to an earnings release.
Moral of the story: Being one of the biggest companies in the country has its perks. What’s a couple billion dollars in unexpected costs when your businesses bring in nearly $100 billion in one quarter?