Health care advocates protest care denials at UnitedHealthcare on July 15, 2024 in Minnetonka, Minnesota. (Photo by David Berding/Getty Images for People’s Action Institute)
Welcome to The Topline, a weekly roundup of the big numbers driving the Minnesota news cycle, as well as the smaller ones that you might have missed. This week: UnitedHealth stock sheds value; the geography of home heating; special education spending increases significantly; and a pretty good deer hunt.
UnitedHealth stock down 14% since Thompson shooting
A weird thing happened in the hours immediately following the shooting of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson on December 4: The company’s stock price rose sharply.
But by the following day it had sunk, and now, close to two weeks after the fact, the price seems stuck about 14% lower than its level prior to the shooting.
The shooting, and attendant public attention, may be behind much of the drop. But there are other factors too, including proposed bipartisan legislation to make insurers like UnitedHealth divest from any pharmacies they own.
UnitedHealth shareholders received dividend payouts of about $7 per share owned last year, and more than $8 per share this year. Those payouts are ultimately derived, in part, from the insurance premiums that patients pay the company. They’re a big part of why American health care is so expensive.
In a document released to investors ahead of its year-end investor conference, UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty wrote that he was “confident” the company “will meet our long-term outlook to grow earnings per share by 13% to 16%, delivering distinctive returns for our shareholders and greater value for consumers and the health system.”
UnitedHealth also works zealously to protect those shareholder returns. Last week, ProPublica reported that the company was limiting access to treatment for kids with autism in order to keep costs low. Separately, a group of Tennessee doctors sued the insurer, accusing them of using “deny, delay and underpay” tactics to reduce provider payments.
As New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci wrote last week, one of the foundational indignities of the American health care system is the knowledge that “there is an unaccountable, cold, calculating entity profiting from one’s misery and vulnerability.”
The geography of home heating
Cartographer Joshua Stevens recently used Census data to map how different parts of the country heat their homes.
In the mild South, for instance, electricity dominates, while in the Northeast oil heating is common. In the upper Midwest there’s something of a dichotomy, with rural areas mostly relying on propane and urban ones using natural gas.
“Pipeline installation is costly and requires [density] to be most efficient,” Stevens explains. “This makes it difficult for natural gas to be the primary fuel type in areas with few, distant houses that are already reliant on other fuels.”
Here in Red Lake Falls (pop. 1,400) in the northwest part of the state, we just began switching to natural gas a few years ago.
Special education spending rises rapidly
MPR News recently reported on the increase of state funding for special education services in schools, which is expected to hit $1.7 billion by 2029.
Historically the state has budgeted for 5 or 6% increases in special ed funding, but this year that number jumped to 9%. About 18% of the state’s school population now use special education services.
Officials say that more comprehensive testing and diagnoses are driving the increase, but inflation and rising wages for educators are also part of the spending picture.
Separately, federal authorities raided two autism treatment centers last week over explosive allegations of Medicaid fraud.
A pretty good deer hunt
Hey, remember when Minnesota deer were in danger of going extinct because they were all getting eaten by wolves? You can scratch all that, because hunters had a pretty good year this year. Their total 2024 haul was 163,743 deer, according to preliminary Department of Natural Resources data, a bump of about 3% over the prior year and the first year-over-year increase since 2020.
That is basically what you’d expect given the mild winter of 2023-2024, which allowed deer populations to rebound slightly. That comports with what the DNR has been saying all along: The chief pressure on deer populations is harsh winters, not the state’s relatively modest wolf pack.