The Sunlight Report on UnitedHealth Group is the result of more than a year of painstaking work by the Center for Health & Democracy (CHD) that did what no one else has done before: piece together the full picture of the nearly 2,700 subsidiaries that make up the largest and most powerful health care company in the world.
Researchers began with a single question: How many companies does UnitedHealth Group actually control?
The answer, as it turns out, was hidden in plain sight but buried deep inside arcane regulatory filings known as Schedule Ys, which insurers submit to state regulators each year. These documents list “related party” entities — essentially a roadmap of who owns what inside a corporate holding company. But they’re far from easy reading. Many are locked in unstructured PDF images. There’s no central database. And the details often vary year to year.
So researchers did the hard work: downloading and manually reviewing Schedule Ys from 2010 through 2024, cross-referencing federal ID numbers and company names, and removing duplicates. When data was missing, researchers supplemented with other public filings and reports. And because these filings don’t say when a subsidiary was acquired or created, CHD estimated the establishment date based on when it first appeared in the documents.
Next, CHD built a custom taxonomy to sort these 2,600+ companies into five broad functional categories, helping the public make sense of UnitedHealth’s sprawling empire—without needing a business degree or flowchart.
The Sunlight Report also uses every publicly available resource, including Google searches; structured queries with tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity; and the collective wisdom of a multi-functional team, to uncover what each company does and why it matters.
The result? A first-of-its-kind, deal-by-deal accounting of how UnitedHealth Group grew into the behemoth it is today. One that finally brings its corporate complexity into the light.
