The Sunlight Report on UnitedHealth Group

“It’s what keeps him up at night.”

I heard those words early last year from a top Department of Justice official during a briefing about the priorities of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division. Those of us in the room were told that one of the things that most worried Jonathan Kanter, who led the antitrust work for the Biden administration, was the growth, through rapid vertical integration, of big health insurers, UnitedHealth Group in particular.

Around the same time, several blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue, at the Capitol, a conservative Republican congressman from Georgia began calling for the breakup of UnitedHealth. Representative Buddy Carter, who would soon chair the Subcommittee on Health of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote on X last year that “UnitedHealth owns 10% of all doctors in the United States. It’s time to bust up this monopoly.”