Insurance companies have pretty thing profit margins regardless, even in areas where profits are not capped. It's a competitive marketplace!
I'm not sure I believe your factoid. Can you cite? UHC is one of the wealthiest companies in the world.
their september 2024 earnings put them at 6% margin. that’s not very good. for reference apple is 15%, mcdonalds is 32% and costco is about 3%. that being said compared to a competitor, elevance at 2.5%, they’re doing well. a little worse than allstate (car and home insurance), which is about 7%.
To be fair, they play a shell game by steering people towards their subsidiary owned medical providers (avoiding loss ratio limits of 15% to 20% by putting the money into providers, which have no profit cap).[0]
[0] https://pnhp.org/news/insurers-avoid-loss-ratio-limits-by-sh...
The 6.0% margin (for UnitedHealthGroup as a whole) already includes that. UnitedHealthcare (the subsidiary health insurer) had a slightly lower operating margin of 5.6% in Q3. https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/content/dam/UHG/PDF/invest...
Yea, and after all that they still only eked out a 4% net profit after tax for 2024.
Health insurance does have profit caps, so like the sibling commenter said their margins are small (6%) but also decently under the cap (20%) in the first place.
The insurance subsidiary will have a cap, but provider subsidiaries have no such cap.[0]
[0] https://pnhp.org/news/insurers-avoid-loss-ratio-limits-by-sh...