Unitedhealth UNH -Q2 -Winn preview

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Unitedhealth Group The chairman and CEO Stephen Hemsley will be exposed to the first real test on Tuesday before the first real test if he reports the result as the greatest private US insurer.

The Dow component has reduced almost half of the share price since mid-May, with the share for the worst year for more than a decade after the income in its flagship medicare program and the optum health doctor practice. This led to the abrupt resignation of the former CEO Andrew Witty and forced the company to replace ex-CEO hemsley and to suspend the profit guidelines. In addition, the company is faced with its Medicare -Billing practices against investigations into criminal and civilian Ministry of Justice.

Since Unitedhealth faces challenges on several fronts, it is in a “perfect storm,” said Ann Hynes, analyst of Mibuho Securities. Now investors want to know how Hemsley directs the company from the vertebral storm after having assured last June that “we are humbly determined to regain their trust and trust”.

Here are three important things that investors from the company's profit report will search.

The large number: 2025 instructions

More than the numbers in the second quarter, the analysts concentrate on the prospects of Unitedhealth for the entire year. Hemsley informed investors that the company would update the profit guidelines for 2025 after it had suspended its forecast in May.

Analysts expect Unitedhealth to publish adjusted income of $ 21.26 per share according to Consensus estimates from LSEG. The estimates range from a low of $ 18 per share to a climax of $ 26.44 per share.

“Everything under $ 18 – that would be negative from the street,” said Hynes

The RBC Capital Markets Analyst Ben Hendrix has set its estimate of a consensus of $ 23.36, but said Wall Street was still a bear for Unitedhealth.

“While we rely our more optimistic prospects on the claim of management that Medicare Advantage for 2026 with the 3% low low-end-MA margins is still responsible within sight.

Medicare Advantage and Optum Health Outlook

Analysts also concentrate on how the company plans to stabilize its unity of doctors, optum health. For years, Unitedhealth helped outperform his colleagues in his flagship Medicare Advantage program by using the 90,000 employees or connected doctors to treat patients in their own plans of Unitedhealth.

“Investors really invested in United for the power of … Optum Health, the power of United, who controls their own Medicare Advantage members, and showed a considerable lead that they could not have before,” said Baird -Analyst Michael Ha.

But in the first quarter this year, Optum Health recorded a strong profit. Analysts said that the jump was partially due to a change in the Medicare refund standards of the bidea era as V28, which makes it more difficult to calculate insurers and doctors to calculate additional services.

According to Mibuho's Hynes, earlier billing coding rules left a lot more space for plans to add billing codes in connection with chronic diseases such as general heart diseases, which would be a higher risk assessment and a reimbursement rate for a higher risk. As part of the new V28 rule, the billing codes are more specific and close gaps that could increase the reimbursement.

“V28 is very black and white, so you have no ability to add codes, and many codes are removed,” she said, adding that this has now led to a structural shift of the edges for the optum health. “

But HA noticed that the V28 changes began in 2024 at a time when seniors started more care. Many of the Medicare Advantage competitors from Unitedhealth made adjustments last year to eliminate the shift. The sudden collapse of optum Health Margen in the first quarter seems to have surprised Unitedhealth.

“I think it is an example of misxecution. They knew that the headwind in the year and well before, but the offset could not find one or the other reason,” said Ha. “We are still confident that Optum Health and United can recover and rebuild the economy of the units, but we think over the next one to two years that this may be possible.”

Legal and regulatory questions

The company rose the winning report on Thursday and recognized in a SEC registration that the Medicare program was exposed to criminal and civil probes by the Ministry of Justice.

According to Unitedhealth, the company is working with the investigation that was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. In March, a statutory special champion also decided in favor of the company in March, in which similar allegations by the doj were submitted during the first Trump administration.

Hynes believes that investors' concerns about the Doj probes have been exaggerated.

“The stock acts as if the government was throwing it from Medicare and Medicaid, and in my opinion the probability is zero,” she said. “It will probably cause you to write a check and make a company integrity agreement … that has happened in the past.”

But the shooting of the death of the Unitedhealth Executive Brian Thompson last December, who was carried out by a shooter to the public prosecutor, who was motivated by insurance refusers, triggered a basis for public criticism of the practices of health insurers.

The former Whistleblower Wendell Potter, who criticized the industry practices after a career at Cigna, said that the pressure on large insurers like Unitedhealth would probably not stop. The regulatory examination in the congress has increased on both sides of the aisle, since Washington is asserted with high health and drug costs in Medicare, Medicaid and other state health programs.

“Many members of the congress who are doctors or republicans are pharmacists and see first -hand the heavy hand of these companies,” said Potter, President of the Center for Health and Democracy. “And so they see interest of Republicans, and I've never seen that before.”

In June, Unitedhealth announced that the examiners of Third Party be hired to check the company's practices in relation to health insurance and pharmaceutical targets in order to “ensure our stakeholders transparency and trust in the company's business practices”.

The company announced CNBC that not many details on this audit would offer this audit during the win for the second quarter. It is not expected that the review will be completed by the end of the third quarter of this year.