MINNETONKA (dpa-AFX) - Health insurance company UnitedHealth (UNH) and its Optum services division are under investigation by the Department of Justice over anti-trust violations, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
The WSJ reported that the investigators have been questioning healthcare industry representatives for the past number of weeks, seeking information about UnitedHealth's ties with Optum, which has over 90,000 doctors under its wing to provide various healthcare solutions.
Optum, acquired by UnitedHealth in 2011, offers services to both its parent company as well as its competitors.
The DOJ is also concerned about whether the company's Medicare billing practices are forcing doctors to aggressively characterize their patients' illnesses in order to wrongly increase payments from the government.
The Journal also reported that the DOJ is probing into the company's proposed $3.3 billion acquisition of Amedisys (AMED), a home-health provider.
According to federal data, Americans spent about $13,493 per person on healthcare facilities in 2022.
The Biden government had passed the first U.S. drug pricing legislation ever in the Inflation Reduction Act last year and had made inquiries about the business dealings of pharmacy benefit manager middlemen.
The lawmakers are looking into the role of similar medical middlemen such as CVS's Caremark and Cigna's Express Scripts in rising healthcare costs as the Biden administration targets to reduce Medicare costs.
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