UnitedHealth Has a Bank. Now Washington Wants More Insurers to Act Like One.

The administrations new ACA rules encourage health insurers to offer loans for medical bills instead of addressing the soaring out-of-pocket costs driving Americans into debt.

Most Americans are familiar with UnitedHealth, the largest private health insurer in America – if not because the corporate giant provides their medical coverage, then because of the massive publicity when the CEO of its key subsidiary was assassinated on a Manhattan street in December 2024.

The shooting of Brian Thompson also sparked a nationwide debate over Big Insurance practices, after many came forward with horror stories about their denied claims for urgent medical care or other bad health insurance experiences. Yet there is one thing most Americans do not know about UnitedHealth: It also has a bank.

But a number of physicians did know about Optum Financial by the spring of 2025, and they were not happy. Some doctors said their practices had been forced to borrow money from Optum to deal with a crippling cyberattack on the medical payments system, and Optum then pressured them to quickly repay the money. One New Jersey specialist in pediatric neurology and neurosurgery told The New York Times: “Optum, in my opinion, is acting like a loan shark trying to rapidly collect.”

Now, financially pressed U.S. families might learn what it’s like to owe money to Optum, under a new plan from the Trump administration.

With out-of-pocket medical costs for Americans skyrocketing, new guidelines for the Affordable Care Act marketplace suggest that insurers begin offering loans to patients with sky-high deductibles and unexpected large medical bills, a loan that presumably would be repaid with interest.

The Trump administration’s plan would worsen an existing crisis. In the world’s only developed nation where families experience medical bankruptcy, and with about one-third of families already in debt because of their medical bills, the government’s proposed solution is even more debt.

“We note that multiyear and 1-year catastrophic plans may be able to offer relief from the high deductible and maximum annual limitation on cost sharing through other mechanisms,” reads the final rule. “For example, issuers of catastrophic plans could consider financing the deductible by providing enrollees a loan.”

Experts say the ACA rules for 2027 and 2028 from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reveal the administration’s focus on expanding consumer choice and reducing federal outlays while ignoring the core issue: higher out-of-pocket costs.

“They’re putting a lot of stock into the idea that people really want these extremely, extremely high deductibles and out-of-pocket costs,” said Katie Keith, director of the Center for Health Policy and the Law at the Georgetown University Law Center. “And so they’re coming up with all these attempts at workarounds, including things like making your insurance company your bank.”

The New York Times noted that UnitedHealth, with its Optum financial unit, is the one large insurer that’s already equipped to offer loan packages to patients who can’t afford their bills. In addition to its controversial program of loans to physician practices, Optum’s bank currently offers government-approved Health Savings Accounts, or HSAs, which allow patients to set aside pre-tax earnings for future medical bills. A UnitedHealth spokesperson wouldn’t comment to the Times on the new ACA rules.

It’s understandable why the Big Insurance icon wouldn’t be eager to weigh in on a concept that will only fuel consumer anger over the increasing unaffordability of health care. U.S. Rep. Shontel Brown, an Ohio Democrat, weighed in on the Trump administration scheme on the social media platform X by noting this would “supercharge medical debt.” She added: “This could ruin people’s finances, while creating a financial incentive for insurers to deny coverage.”

Indeed, a 2025 report from the health-policy organization KFF found that UnitedHealth had – along with two Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates – one of the nation’s three highest rates of claims denials for its ACA Marketplace policies. Its reported denial rate of 33% was nearly double the overall national rate of 19%. Now UnitedHealth – which posted more than $12 billion in profits in 2025, the highest of the nation’s insurers – could make even more money from denying claims or raising deductibles and offering loans.

The crisis of high out-of-pocket medical costs in America has been spiraling rapidly since the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress rejected extending enhanced federal subsidies that had made coverage under the ACA, or Obamacare, reasonably affordable.

For millions of Americans, the end of those subsidies – with some consumers getting 2026 monthly premium bills that have more than doubled – has meant shifting to the lowest level of Bronze ACA plans, which come with high annual deductibles. This will mean thousands of dollars in bills for an unexpected major illness.

The soaring premiums have also seen many families joining the growing ranks of the uninsured. One early analysis from KFF predicted that as many as 5.5 million Americans – or about 25% of the peak enrollment – will have dropped their ACA insurance by the end of 2026, The new negative aura around health insurance – higher premiums, higher-out-of-pocket costs for those choosing inferior plans, or those without any coverage at all – is behind a recent report that about one-third of all Americans are cutting routine expenditures or even skipping meals to deal with their rising doctor bills and drug costs.

Instead of continuing the subsidies that had brought a steep rise in ACA enrollment earlier in the decade, the Republican-led government insists it is addressing the growing affordability crisis with new options that dangle lower premiums with the much greater risk of painful out-of-pocket costs in an emergency.

The government’s new ACA rules for 2027 increase the number of people who’d be eligible to buy so-called catastrophic plans that might defray costs for an extreme medical emergency but put consumers on the hook for the costs of most doctor visits or prescriptions. This is on top of new rules that will allow insurers to raise deductibles for the third-tier Bronze plans to $15,600 for individual coverage or $31,200 per family.

The Trump administration hoped to boost catastrophic plans to spike their enrollment as high as 3 million Americans, but Louise Norris, the longtime expert who writes for Healthinsurance.org, noted that a variety of factors have prevented any surge in customers for these high-deductible plans. In some states, she noted, premiums are actually lower for the Bronze plans, and this year, only about 67,000 people have signed up for the catastrophic plans.

Norris said the Trump administration’s idea for insurance-company loans is “that you can pay back that deductible over time, [but] I’m not sure that would really offset those other factors in terms of making those plans appealing.” She added that, “if you don’t qualify for subsidies, and you’re looking for the cheapest plan you can get in a lot of areas, that’s actually going to be a Bronze plan.”

So the government seems determined to make catastrophic insurance popular when American consumers don’t really want it.

Instead, the various schemes in the new ACA rules for 2027 and beyond – pitched with a notion of offering consumers more choices instead of the cost relief that Americans need – are projected to cost a whopping $1.3 billion annually, while it’s projected that two million more people will likely drop their ACA coverage because of the expense.

While the Trump administration and its GOP allies on Capitol Hill own this current crisis, Democrats need to acknowledge their own complicity in the situation.

Democrats in the past have bent to insurers’ demands to make sure all the health plans offered in the ACA marketplace have cost-sharing requirements of some amount and also to allow the out-of-pocket maximum to be unaffordably high for most Americans – especially for people with chronic conditions and those with low incomes.

This year’s midterm election is an opportunity for candidates to promise that health care affordability will be a priority. The centerpiece of such an agenda should be lowering the outrageous out–of-pocket maximums. The Lower Out of Pockets NOW coalition, which I founded, supports a bill sponsored by Massachusetts Democratic U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss to extend the Biden-era Medicare prescription drug yearly out-of-pocket maximum of $2,000 (rising to $2,100 this year) to people enrolled in ACA marketplace plans.

Some states already offer innovative cost-control plans. For example, Massachusetts now requires issuers of individual coverage and fully insured group coverage to limit increases in the enrollees’ out-of-pocket costs to the Consumer Price Index inflation rate for the Boston area. For 2027, the cap will be 3.6%. The covered expenses include plan deductibles, copayments and coinsurance bills.

When the idea of loans from insurers like UnitedHealth was reported in The New York Times, an attorney commented on social media that “it’s hard to top this level of dystopia.” This is a wake-up call to focus on the real pathways to affordable health care.