FOUL PLAY
Insurance company mistreatment
Think of $36.8 million as pocket change? Rhode Island’s United Healthcare of New England wanted to send this sum as an “extraordinary dividend” to its Minnesota-based parent company, United HealthCare Services—itself a subsidiary of the giant UnitedHealth Group (the same UnitedHealth that was the center of a stock options scandal). Less than a year earlier, the insurer had shipped off $17 million to its parent company.
The two dividends would have amounted to more than half of the insurance company’s roughly $90 million surplus, prompting the state’s Health Insurance Commissioner to step in. After a firestorm of public protest, United Healthcare withdrew its proposal—but how much money gets shifted to corporate parent profits under the radar?
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