The coronavirus outbreak did little damage to the immediate profitability of UnitedHealth Group, the nation's largest health insurer said Wednesday. One of its top executives will join the World Health Organization to fight the pandemic, it added.
UnitedHealth said it is employing and paying full wages to its entire workforce of 325,000 people, even as unemployment surge across the country and hospitals furlough staff due to sharp declines in elective medical procedures.
Health care providers have stopped nonemergency surgeries in order to conserve critical supplies for the pandemic response, but UnitedHealth said the decline in those procedures and other COVID-19 factors weren't significant drivers of its first quarter results.
"These results reflect minimal impact from the progression of the COVID-19 virus across the U.S. given various factors that only emerged late in the quarter," the company said in a statement.
UnitedHealth Group is Minnesota's largest company by revenue and employs 18,000 people in the state. It's the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, which covers 43 million people in the U.S.
For the quarter ending March 31, the company saw a profit of $3.4 billion _ off by about 3% from the same period last year _ on revenue of $64.4 billion.
On a per-share basis, earnings of $3.72 beat by 9 cents the profit expected by analysts surveyed by Refinitiv.
Andrew Witty, who is chief executive of the company's Optum division for health care services, will be on a leave of absence while helping to lead the vaccine initiative, the company announced Wednesday. He is expected to return at approximately year end.
Before Witty joined the UnitedHealth Group board in 2017 and took the top position at Optum one year later, he was chief executive at the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. During that time, Witty "gained global recognition for his efforts to develop and expand access to critically needed vaccines," UnitedHealth Group said in a statement.
