The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted both the weakness and resilience of different business models with online retailers such as Amazon
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and streaming services like Netflix
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among the companies falling into the latter category. A catastrophic health crisis may also seem like a good opportunity for health insurance companies to boost their profits, and according to their most recent quarterly results, they are raking in billions of extra dollars thanks to the pandemic. In several cases, major insurance providers have even doubled their profits.

In some parts of the country, hospitals are being overwhelmed by an influx of patients and many have announced staggering financial losses. Meanwhile, insurers have been able to avoid shelling out big money for surgeries and other complicated medical procedures while people have been less likely to visit their doctors over the past couple of months. That has resulted in the massive increase in net income between Q2 2019 and Q2 2020 illustrated on the following infographic.

The UnitedHealth Group saw its net income double from $3.4 billion to $6.7 billion while Anthem’s also grew two-fold, climbing from $1.1 billion to $2.3 billion. CVS Health owns health insurance provider Aetna in addition to other brands including pharmaceutical companies and it added an extra billion dollars in net income in the second quarter of this year. Humana
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‘s results were also staggering with net income of $1.8 billion compared to $940 billion for the same quarter of 2019.

It is important to mention that health insurance companies saw their profits capped under the Affordable Care Act and they are required to pay out rebates for the benefit of consumers, a process which does not appear to be happening fast enough given the current crisis. The Health and Human Services Department weighed in on the situation in recent days, advising companies to both reduce premiums and accelerate rebates.

*Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)