UnitedHealth ($UNH) podcast mentions
Well, Laura, I started with a simple observation. You know, patients pay more, employers pay more, taxpayers pay more, and yet physicians increasingly hear there isn't enough money to maintain reimbursement. Patients face increased cost sharing, and both physicians and hospitals spend enormous resources navigating administrative requirements So rather than beginning with the ideology, I thought we should begin with accounting. And for the, for this talk, I like to consider 4 numbers. Employer-sponsored health insurance premiums were about $13,770 in 2010. In 2025, they rose to $26,993. That's the first number. Then the second one is adjusted for inflation in practice costs. Medicare physician payments declined 33% from 2001 through 2026. The third one is physicians report dealing with an average of 43 prior authorizations every week, consuming about 12 hours of physician and staff time. And then the, the last set of numbers at 4, and UnitedHealth Group's revenue increased from $94 billion in 2010 to nearly $448 billion in 2025. Think about it. Now, revenue is not profit. That distinction matters. United has evolved into a vertically integrated healthcare enterprise participating in multiple parts of the healthcare economy. The point isn't that $448 billion was somehow retained by insurer, the question is broader. Follow the dollar through the entire enterprise, not merely through the insurance premium. None of these numbers proves anybody did anything wrong, but put them together and I think we're entitled to ask, who captured the value? We know what healthcare costs, but do we know where the value went?
Morgan Laurio - 1 · Becker’s Healthcare Podcast · The Economics Behind Patient Care with Dr. Morgan Lorio · 2026-09-13It has no practical impact on anything, inflation or growth, but Warsh's calculus could be exactly that. I showed them I'm willing to do it and it will have limited or no impact on growth, they said. The earnings calendar is very light this week. Dave& Buster's reports Monday. Lennar weighs in on Wednesday. Carnival reports Thursday. In the news this weekend, AI creators are hitting the brakes as worries about rogue agents have rapidly evolved into existential alarm. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that the progress of improving AI model capabilities should be slowed down. Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence, not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up, he wrote Saturday. This comes on the heels of AI scientists assigning a better than 10% probability that AI could wipe out humanity as companies hurdle towards AGI and recursive learning. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman then posted, "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same." Altman also told Fortune that with current safety concerns, this year would not be a good time for OpenAI to go public. Tech analyst Dan Ives said this is an important step for the industry around more self-regulation on the AI model pace, but the reality is China is not slowing down anytime soon. The pace of innovation will be a focus of the tech industry/beltway with sovereign AI key, he said. And for income investors, FedEx and UnitedHealth go ex-dividend on Monday. FedEx pays out on October 1st and UNH pays out on September 22nd. Altria and Coca-Cola go ex-dividend Tuesday. Altria pays out on October 9th and Coke pays out on October 1st. That's all for today's Wall Street Brunch. Look for links to stories in the show notes section. Don't forget, these episodes will be up with transcriptions at seekingalpha.com/wsb. And join the elite community of real investors to unearth great investing ideas. Just head to seekingalpha.com/subscriptions.
Kim Kahn · Wall Street Breakfast · Fed faces a rate hike reckoning · 2026-09-13Yeah, we are very excited with these advancements. And, you know, it's kind of, you know, I'm seeing even with my kids when they get to some ages that you see some of the fruit of work and investments that you've done on them more clearly. You know, this is something that was our mission for about 15 years and specifically during like, you know, more than 10 years of of R&D work, finally seeing the fruit of all that advancements. And frankly, not all the work just by Guardant Health, by the whole community of other researchers in the field that now we are seeing the clinical impact and adoption that we are seeing. But definitely it's very exciting days when we are thinking about now Shield blood test is FDA approved. Covered by Medicare, covered by some major payers like UnitedHealth Group, major guideline bodies like, you know, NCCN and American Cancer Society is including Shield blood test as an option for colorectal cancer screening for right patient types. It's very exciting. It came as a result of, I think, rigorous clinical validations that we've done. We've showed that it works. The quality of the test is very good. And then the real-world evidence and the impact of this test. We've done randomized studies in some health systems, in some suburb areas, even in the— some health systems where the overall colorectal cancer screening rate was 45 to 50%. And then they added Shield as a new choice and then The overall colorectal cancer screening went to high 80s or low 90s in terms of percentage of participation by patients. It's very exciting to see. And I think physicians are very excited about this Shield blood test. What we are seeing is when they see the performance of this test, the FDA approval, the sensitivity of detecting this blood test in early stage CRC relative to you know, published performance by other modalities, they're finding this is the first blood test. It's the best in the class that can really meet the need. And when they offer it to their patients, the follow-through by patients is typically even in the office, in the clinic before they leave the clinic, the health system, the blood draw is done over 90%. Of the orders of the offered test get converted to getting the actual screening done.
Amir Ali Talasaz · Becker’s Healthcare Podcast · The Future of Colorectal Cancer Screening: Reaching the Unscreened · 2026-09-10Raina, thank you for that warm intro as always. I think this is week 4 that we've been doing the tax planning series and I still get so many emails from people that listen to the podcast and they love it. I have people that just reach out to say, oh, I didn't know XYZ before and now I'm down the rabbit hole. And that's really the goal of this, you know, I think segment is just to help people educate themselves and learn for themselves. And Seeking Alpha, I think, is the best community to do that. And so I'm excited to get into the tax planning stuff that we'll talk about with tax loss harvesting. 'Cause there's actually a lot of nuance with that strategy that I think a lot of investors aren't necessarily aware of. But also happy to give an update just on the firm. As you mentioned, you know, we're a value investing firm. So when I work with clients, I always try to put quality, you know, in front of quantity. So I don't go out and buy 20 stocks for clients. It never made sense to me. You know, why would you put money in your 20th best idea? You know, why not your 19th? right? And you could apply that same logic so on and, and, and so forth down the, the chain effectively. So we focus on quality, you know, a few of the names, uh, that we own, I've written articles about on Seeking Alpha, like Hims and ServiceNow and UnitedHealth Group. Uh, just fantastic businesses and I'm happy to talk about them. These of course are not recommendations. I don't know anybody specifically listening in the audience and what your situation is, but I'm a fan of stocks and so I love talking about this stuff. You know, Hims is our crown jewel. That's a stock that I've owned personally since 2021, and it's a stock that's been in client accounts since inception. Every time I onboard a new client, I, you know, Hims is usually the leading stock in their portfolio. And that's just because their growth is tremendous. I think their total addressable market is tremendous. There are risks in that business. You know, anytime you navigate in the healthcare industry, it's always very regulatory.
Raul Shah · Investing Experts · Tax Loss Harvesting: Tax Alpha with Raul Shah · 2026-09-02So, you know, almost every other week it seems like there's some news on Hims saying, oh, you know, they're kind of breached from doing XYZ. So it's a, you know, it's never— there's never a dull day owning that stock. But I think it's a tremendous business with great unit economics, and I expect it's going to do very well for a long period of time. ServiceNow is another fantastic company. I'm a huge fan of the CEO, Bill McDermott. I've read his book and I just really admire the integrity that he has. And of course, I've never met him personally, but you can get a good glimpse of people when you read their life story and where they come from, especially when it's from humble beginnings. I was buying that stock. I'm the only portfolio manager at Dock Stock Financial. So I oversee all the accounts and I was placing that stock in client accounts at $98, $95 and even further down. And now we're at almost $150 in like 6 weeks. So I always tell people price does not determine value, right? And that's, we've had conversations about this in the past and it's a bit hypocritical for me to come on air and say, because the price is going up, I'm justified or I'm right. I'm looking at the business valuations and I'm looking at, you know, the earnings continuing to go up. I'm looking at the unit economics of all these businesses continuing to improve, especially with UnitedHealth Group. They've come a long way in 6 months. And you know, that's why the stock prices have risen and why I expect them to continue to rise. But that's the name of the game, you know, value investing. That's why I always tell people price and value don't equal each other. If you chase price, you'll lose that game 100% of the time. If you chase value, you'll win not 100% of the time, but you'll get pretty dang close.
Raul Shah · Investing Experts · Tax Loss Harvesting: Tax Alpha with Raul Shah · 2026-09-02