00:00 Speaker A

United Health Shares are soaring after Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway revealed a new stake in the insurer. Yahoo Finance Senior Health Reporter Angeli Camlani here now with a closer look at that investment. It’s an interesting one.

00:13 Angeli Camlani

Yeah, it certainly is. We know that 5 million shares have been purchased of United Healthcare stock by Berkshire Hathaway, and that is coming at a time when the stock is at quite a low. We know that it was, you know, quite on quite a run for the last few years and then started pairing back and down 46% year to date as of yesterday’s close. But it is shooting up today as a result of this investment, and the reason being that we have a lot of different changes that have happened at the company while it’s under pressure from macro factors in the industry, such as cost of expenses, you know, the medical expenses are on the rise. They’ve seen the tragedy of a executive shooting late last year, as well as the cyber attack that happened earlier in the year. So it’s just been compounding problems for the healthcare giant. And now we’re seeing a switch in the CEO, Andrew Woody stepping down, and then returning CEO Stephen Hemsley at the helm. He also, by the way, was at the helm when Berkshire last had a stake in the company. That was back in the 2006 to 2017 period. In between there is when Berkshire did let go of its shares before previously had about 1. something million. So looking at that, it might indicate, you know, Berkshire’s and Warren Buffett’s interest in Stephen Hemsley being back. We do know that with all of these problems, the company has indicated that they know that there is a turnaround needed, that they are under pressure, a lot of it. Hemsley did say on the second quarter earnings call back in July that, you know, the company has made mistakes, quote, saying that the beyond the environmental factors, just like I told you about those macro factors in the industry that are reflecting the entire impacting the entire sector and more specifically to them, they’ve made pricing and operation mistakes, as well as other companies. Of course, we’ve seen many of their peers under pressure as well in the last year. They’ve missed earnings as well. Um, so really all eyes on what this turnaround does look like and whether or not Berkshire came in at the right time before they start regaining some of that momentum.

04:21 Speaker A

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