In second episode of the HEALTH CARE un-covered Show, we walk you through the most recent earnings reports of seven of the largest for-profit health insurance corporations in the country.
Every three months, the nation’s largest health insurers release earnings statements filled with crammed financial tables, investor language and Wall Street jargon. Most people never see them. Even fewer try to understand what they really reveal about how the U.S. health care system works.
In second episode of the HEALTH CARE un-covered Show, we do something no one else does: walk you through the most recent earnings reports of seven of the largest for-profit health insurance corporations in the country — UnitedHealth Group, CVS Health (Aetna), Cigna, Elevance, Humana, Centene and Molina. As you’ll see, the results paint a striking picture of how powerful and profitable Big Insurance has become.
Together, those companies collected nearly $1.7 trillion in revenue in 2025, about $175 billion more than the year before and generated more than $54 billion in profits. Yet despite the record financial performance, the companies covered roughly 10 million fewer people than they did in 2024 – and ever-increasing chunks of their revenues are now coming from Americans’ tax dollars.
We show evidence of a trend reshaping the health care economy: self-dealing through insurers’ vertical integration and their huge government contracts, which accounts for much of the industry’s growth. For example, UnitedHealthcare now gets more than 77% of its revenue from government programs such as Medicare Advantage and Medicaid. As a reminder, Medicare Advantage is not traditional Medicare but a very profitable privatized version of the program that’s funded by taxpayers and that last year overpaid insurers by $84 billion.
We also examine stock buybacks. Between 2015 and 2025,these seven companies spent more than $137 billion buying back their own shares, a move that boosts earnings per share and enriches shareholders and top executives. That’s $137 billion that could have been used to reduce premiums and out-of-pocket expenses but went into the pockets of investors instead.
To put the numbers in perspective, we compare these insurers with some of America’s most recognizable corporations — from Chevron and PepsiCo to Bank of America and Salesforce. Most of the big seven generate more revenue than these household names. And many of the insurance conglomerates are growing faster than companies like Target, Uber, Disney and Starbucks.
We take viewers inside Wendell’s office to make sense of Big Insurance’s dense 2025 earnings reports.
You won’t find an analysis quite like this anywhere else.
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This episode has been re-uploaded with corrected numbers. For instance, Disney was listed as having revenues of $274.9B in 2025. The correct number is $94.4B. The percent change used in the original video (+80%) was correct.
HENRY KOTULA 