Provides health insurance plans and pharmacy benefit management services through UnitedHealthcare and Optum.Yahoo Finance ↗unitedhealthgroup.com ↗
1 take · first discussed May 17, 2025
Every call, plotted at the price the day they made it.
The only host thesis provided comes from Friedberg, who holds a bearish, medium-conviction view on OptumRx. He argues that the PBM model — of which OptumRx is a key part — profits through opaque markups and "spread taking," and that the vertical integration of PBMs with payers like UnitedHealth Group represents a structural market distortion. Friedberg sees meaningful reform risk, suggesting that removing PBMs from the system altogether would address a core problem in drug pricing. No other hosts weighed in, so no consensus or disagreement can be established beyond Friedberg's stance.
Friedberg flags OptumRx as part of a PBM oligopoly generating excess profits through markups and obfuscation, and argues the vertical integration of PBMs with payers is a structural distortion that faces serious reform risk.
They're allowed to be owned by the payer, which is crazy... there's a lot of obfuscation of the true cost of the drugs. There's a lot of markups, a lot of spread taking. And so if you took the PBMs out of the market, that would solve one”1:35:42