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Health insurers will reportedly meet with US officials next Monday to discuss how to mitigate cash flow issues caused by last month’s cyberattack on UnitedHealth Group’s (NYSE:UNH) Change Healthcare unit, which handles around 50% of the nation’s medical claims.
The Biden administration is putting pressure on health insurers to advance payments to healthcare providers that have been hit by the system outage, which has impacted their ability to process bills and claims, according to Bloomberg.
Health insurers are reportedly concerned that sending out payments before claims are properly processed will cause accounting problems down the road when the payments need to be reconciled with billing, Bloomberg added.
Last week, UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty met with White House officials to discuss the crisis. The Department of Health and Human Services has reportedly opened an investigation into the cyberattack.
Change’s systems were knocked offline by a cyberattack on Feb. 21, allegedly by a Russian ransomware group called Blackcat. The system outage has caused disruptions for hospitals, pharmacies and healthcare providers that relied on Change for core administrative tasks such billing and claims processing.
In early March, Reuters reported that UnitedHealth was said to have paid Blackcat $22M in bitcoin to regain control of Change’s systems.
Major U.S. health insurers include Humana (HUM), Cigna (CI), CVS Health (CVS) and Elevance (ELV).
