The Justice Department has launched an antitrust investigation into UnitedHealth Group, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing individuals with knowledge of the matter.
Investigators have in recent weeks been interviewing healthcare industry representatives in sectors where UnitedHealth competes, including doctor groups, the report said.
During their interviews, investigators have asked about issues including certain relationships between the corporate’s UnitedHealthcare insurance unit and its Optum health-services-arm, which owns physician groups, amongst other assets.
UnitedHealth’s unit, Optum Health, offers a spread of healthcare solutions, from pharmacy profit management to financial consultation and mental health support.
Americans are facing soaring healthcare costs, with the estimated healthcare spending per person standing at about $13,493 in 2022, in line with federal data released late last yr.
The Biden administration has made lowering drug prices a priority. It passed the primary US drug pricing laws ever within the Inflation Reduction Act last yr, and has since turned its sights on pharmacy profit manager middlemen.
Lawmakers and the Federal Trade Commission have been investigating the role of those middlemen in rising healthcare costs. Several bills have been within the works since last yr that will require them to make their business dealings public, including the fees they earn on transactions.
The WSJ also reported that the DOJ is examining the corporate’s Medicare billing practices to see if doctors are aggressively characterizing their patients illnesses to wrongly increase payments from the federal government.
Investigators have asked about possible impacts of the corporate’s doctor-group acquisitions on rivals and consumers, the WSJ report said, citing the people.
The corporate also competes with CVS Health and Cigna that supply medical insurance plans together with pharmacy profit management (PBM) businesses.
The DOJ has previously sued to stop UnitedHealth Group’s acquisition of Change Healthcare in February 2022, but accomplished the buyout later that yr.
An outage attributable to a cybersecurity attack at billing and data systems provider Change Healthcare has caused disruptions across healthcare businesses in america since last week.
The DOJ declined to comment, while UnitedHealth didn’t immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment.
Shares of the corporate closed down 2.3%.
On Monday, Examiner Media reported, citing an internal email, that UnitedHealth received a notice from the DOJ in October last yr, saying it had begun a “non-public antitrust investigation into the corporate.”