Andrew Witty, CEO of Unitedhealth Group, testifies during the audience of the Senate finance committee entitled “Hacking America's Health Care: evaluation of the change of cyber-attack of health care and Whats Next”, in the Dirksen building in Washington, DC, May 1, 2024.
Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty images
United Group Tuesday, announced the surprise release of the CEO Andrew Witty and suspended her forecasts in 2025, sending shares of the health care giant plummeting more than 10% in the morning trade.
Witty immediately withdrew for “personal reasons,” said the company. He will act as his main advisor to his successor, Stephen Hemsley, who was CEO of Unitedhealth Group from 2006 to 2017 after joining the company in 1997.
“We are grateful for the management of Andrew de United from Unitedhealth Group, especially during some of the most difficult moments to which a company has ever faced,” Hemsley said in a statement.
The company said that its decision to follow its directives was partly due to an increase in medical costs, which led to the drop in other insurance actions. Actions of CVS health abandoned more than 4% and Dark fell by more than 6%, while Humana also slipped more than 6% and Cigna lost more than 2%.
Witty became CEO of Unitedhealth in 2021 after previously directed the British pharmaceutical giant Glaxosmithkline for almost a decade. He supervised a tumultuous last year for the company, which faced government surveys, a historic cyber attack, higher medical costs than expected and the torrent of the public reverse after the murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of the insurance unit of the Unitedhealthcare company.
The mind in December publicly admitted that the American health system was “defective” and needs a reform, but also defended Unitedhealthcare.
Unitedhealth Group said on Tuesday that it partially suspended the prospects because the medical costs of new registered in the private insurance plans of the company remained higher than expected. The company also said that “the care activity continued to accelerate while expanding more types of services than those seen in the first quarter”.
He occurs only a few weeks after Unitedhealth Group has reduced his annual profit forecasts, warning high medical costs in so -called Advantage Medicare plans. These higher expenses have rekindled the entire insurance industry in the past year, as more and more elderly people return to hospitals to undergo procedures that they had delayed during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as joint and hip organizations.
In April, the company also published its first results since 2008 and the decrease in actions that followed Erased nearly $ 190 billion in market capitalization at the time.
But investors can accommodate the return of Hemsley, which supervised the transformation of the company into a health care conglomerate of $ 400 billion which controls everything, from the largest private insurer in the country to one of the largest pharmacy services, as well as groups of doctors and sensitive data in health care of millions of Americans.
“Unitedhealth Group has enormous growth opportunities while we continue to improve health care and carry out our potential – and, in so doing, to return to our long -term growth target from 13 to 16%,” said Hemsley.
The company plans to resume growth in 2026, according to the press release.