The Unholy Matrimony of UnitedHealth with the University of Minnesota is Dangerous for the Future of Health Care

As the world’s largest health care corporation steps into the classroom, a new University of Minnesota Medical School elective blurs the line between medical education and corporate health care.

Last fall, the University of Minnesota Medical School shifted the boundaries of its academic domain and opened its doors to UnitedHealth Group in a partnered launch of a pilot course entitled Leadership and Value. The company is headquartered in Minnetonka, Minnesota, a mere 20-minute drive from the medical school campus. It is the world’s largest health care corporation by revenue, containing two divisions: UnitedHealthcare (health insurance) and Optum (health care services, data, and pharmacy benefit managers).

The class was developed as an elective for fourth-year medical students who are interested in health insurance and health systems leadership. As two of the nine students who took this pilot course, we are concerned that the partnership of UnitedHealth and the university in medical education represents the insidious seedling of an unholy matrimony.

Syllabus for University of Minnesota Medical School and UnitedHealth Group’s pilot course entitled Leadership and Value.

To contextualize this concern, one must understand UnitedHealth’s corporate philosophy. The company prides itself on practicing a “value-based care” model, which ostensibly encourages more scrupulous use of health care resources to focus primarily on medical interventions that yield the highest benefit. This approach is not inherently concerning. It can uphold evidence-based recommendations of investing in primary care and focusing on disease prevention. However, it also shifts the bias of health care delivery toward withholding care rather than providing it. This benefits the patient when an intervention is superfluous, but it harms the patient when an intervention is needed. Disturbingly, it is not the patient’s doctor who is trusted to determine if an intervention is needed – it is UnitedHealth. And of course, withholding care saves the company money. Thus, the value-based care model — when practiced by a for-profit insurance company — has resulted in UnitedHealth leading the nation in claims denials.

Dr. Allison Leopold

With this context, we return to the pilot course’s origin. It arose out of a proposition from UnitedHealth, which approached Dean Jakob Tolar at the university to discuss initiating a relationship with the medical school. The company’s request was twofold: it proposed 1) a joint research project leveraging Optum’s considerable data resources, and 2) a pilot course at the medical school. Regarding the course, UnitedHealth pitched its curriculum as an opportunity to teach students about “winning the United way,” with a focus on training students to be “high-value providers.” This proposition was not entirely realized, as Dean Tolar ultimately negotiated a “balanced” curriculum in which UnitedHealth and the medical school would each direct half the course. UnitedHealth would preach the benefits of value-based care, and the school would host weekly debriefs, provide health systems education, and hold leadership workshops with faculty from the university’s Rothenberger Leadership Academy.

Students heard from UnitedHealth division leaders throughout the four weeks, with in-person sessions at Optum headquarters once weekly and debriefs at the university with faculty once weekly. On the first day of class, we met Dr. Omar Baker, a pediatrician and deputy chief medical director of UnitedHealth who had just flown in from Washington, D.C. Immediately, he relayed that “UnitedHealth Group is very misunderstood.” He offered students a framework for the course: “It’s no secret we’re a for-profit company. So the question is, how do we balance our fiduciary responsibilities to our shareholders with our clinical work?” He added, “Everything you guys learn, you should try to see it through the lens of the different stakeholders.” This framework was a stark shift from medical education, where students are typically asked to blend a scientific and humanistic perspective to provide evidence-based care without concern for financial imperatives. With this shift in mind, the four-week course began.

UnitedHealth Group’s Campus Guide For Medical School Elective Attendees for in-person sessions at Optum headquarters.

Students met with a dozen or so UnitedHealth employees throughout the four weeks. The pattern of these sessions was clear. For the most part, UnitedHealth employees would present a company-approved slideshow with graphics and slogans that ranged from vague corporate jargon to optimistic messaging about the future of health care. Then, they would open time for questions. Students would – either curiously or skeptically – challenge the corporate newspeak. This is where the bulk of the learning occurred.

As an example, one UnitedHealth lecture was given by an employee who worked in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) office at UnitedHealth. She explained UnitedHealth’s definition of health equity: “Health equity is a state in which all people are able to live their healthiest lives. We work with communities, providers, and partners to address the barriers that result from the circumstances in which people are born, live, learn, work, and age.” During the Q&A session, students asked if the company ever sacrificed its bottom line for the sake of improving health equity. We were told that their office only invests in communities where they have large membership enrollment. “The disparity does have to align with a return on investment.” With further probing, we uncovered that UnitedHealth does not share its population health data with local communities or universities, nor does it provide long-term sustainable funding to health equity projects. Ultimately, we were told, “None of it is charity work, it’s all intentionally designed to improve outcomes in communities where we have members [patients] so that we get return on investment.”

Articles as part of the Leadership and Value course.

This pattern of achieving transparency only upon student probing begs several questions. Would the learning objectives of these sessions have been achieved if the students had not been active participants or posed probing questions? Does the supposed “balanced” curriculum negotiated by the university rely solely on the preexisting knowledge and skepticism of the students who elect to take the course? And lastly, where was the expert voicing the opposition to UnitedHealth’s model? A balanced perspective is requisite in any university class, especially housed in a state flagship institution. Were it not for consistent student pushback, the UnitedHealth sessions would have amounted to corporate propaganda.

While many topics in a medical curriculum do not warrant a discussion of opposing views, the topics of health care access and health care financing do, especially when UnitedHealth’s voice is at the table. UnitedHealth is a controversial entity in the American health care landscape, with 16 lawsuits in the past seven years regarding denial of care, upcoding and overbilling, patient privacy violations, and anticompetitive steering of patients and providers. None of this is discussed in the four-week curriculum. While this course may encourage students to think critically about the health care system, it also welcomes an onslaught of UnitedHealth corporate propaganda without a feasible means of counterpointing or fact-checking the company’s claims. Balancing UnitedHealth’s perspective with a more neutral academic one – while better than nothing – is not a “balance” at all.

This course represents the worrisome beginning of a budding relationship between UnitedHealth and the university’s medical school. One day at the company’s headquarters, we received a surprise visit from the (now former) CEO of UnitedHealth himself — Sir Andrew Witty. I asked what he envisions for the future of this partnership. “It just doesn’t make sense for for us not to be working together more…specifically with the university, you know with all relationships you have to start somewhere,” he said…”If you get something successful, that just motivates people to look for the next thing…because we feel like [this course] is going well, it will be an encouragement to then move to the next.” When asked what ‘the next’ may entail, he said, “It could be anything! It could be more in the education space, research collaboration…working with the medical school more directly in terms of collaboration on new ideas.” In other words, UnitedHealth has its sights set on the university, and it is eager for more intermingling.

Dr. Allison Leopold graduated from the University of Minnesota Medical School in 2025, and she is now an emergency medicine resident in Oakland, California. Her work focuses on harm reduction and substance use, street medicine, single payer health care, and arts in medicine. She plans to practice both emergency and addiction medicine in the public sector.