UnitedHealth Group has paid more than $3 billion to providers following cyberattack
In this photo illustration the UnitedHealth Group logo displayed on a smartphone screen.
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UnitedHealth Group has paid out an additional $1 billion to providers that have been impacted by the Change Healthcare cyberattack since last week, bringing the total amount of funds advanced to more than $3.3 billion, the company said on Wednesday.
UnitedHealth, which owns Change Healthcare, discovered in February that a cyber threat actor had breached part of the unit’s information technology network. Change Healthcare processes more than 15 billion billing transactions annually, and one in every three patient records passes through its systems, according to its website.
The company disconnected the affected systems “immediately upon detection” of the threat, according to a filing with the SEC. The interruptions left many health-care providers temporarily unable to fill prescriptions or get reimbursed for their services by insurers.
Many health-care providers rely on reimbursement cash flow to operate, so the fallout has been substantial. Smaller and mid-sized practices told CNBC they were making tough decisions about how to stay afloat. A survey published by the American Hospital Association earlier this month found that 94% of hospitals have experienced financial disruptions from the attack.
As a result, UnitedHealth introduced its temporary funding assistance program to help providers in need of support. The company said the $3.3 billion in advances will not need to be repaid until claims flows return to normal. Federal agencies like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have introduced additional options to ensure that states and other stakeholders can make interim payments to providers, according to a release.
UnitedHealth has been working to restore Change Healthcare’s systems in recent weeks, and it expects some disruptions will continue into April, according to its website. The company began processing a backlog of more than $14 billion in claims on Friday, and on Wednesday said, “claims have begun to flow.”
Shares of UnitedHealth have fallen more than 6% since the attack was disclosed.
Late last month, the company said the ransomware group Blackcat is behind the attack. Blackcat, also called Noberus and ALPHV, steals sensitive data from institutions and threatens to publish it unless a ransom is paid, according to a December release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Department of State on Wednesday announced it’s offering a reward of up to $10 million for information that could help identify or locate cyber actors linked to Blackcat.
UnitedHealth said Wednesday that it’s “still determining the content of the data that was taken by the threat actor.” The company said a “leading vendor” is analyzing the impacted data. United Health is working closely with law enforcement and third parties like Palo Alto Networks and Google‘s Mandiant to assess the attack.
“We continue to be vigilant, and to date have not seen evidence of any data having been published on the web,” UnitedHealth said. “And we are committed to providing appropriate support to people whose data is found to have been compromised.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, wrote a letter to UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty on Monday requesting information about the “scope and extent” of the breach.
Raskin asked Witty for information about when Change Healthcare notified its clients about the breach, what specific infrastructure and information was targeted and what cybersecurity procedures the company has in place. The committee requested written responses “no later” than April 8.
“Given your company’s dominant position in the nation’s health care and health insurance industry, Change Healthcare’s prolonged outage as a result of the cyberattack has already had ‘significant and far-reaching’ consequences,” Raskin wrote.
The Biden administration also launched an investigation into UnitedHealth earlier this month due to the “unprecedented magnitude of the cyberattack,” according to a statement.
WATCH: UnitedHealth unit begins processing $14 billion medical claims backlog
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AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.
Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.
“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.
The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid.
“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.
AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.
Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event announcing new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, April 2, 2025.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
President Donald Trump announced an aggressive, far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy this week, leaving many economists and U.S. trade partners to question how the White House calculated its rates.
Trump’s plan established a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country, though many nations such as China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to much steeper rates. At a ceremony in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, Trump held up a poster board that outlined the tariffs that it claims are “charged” to the U.S., as well as the “discounted” reciprocal tariffs that America would implement in response.
Those reciprocal tariffs are mostly about half of what the Trump administration said each country has charged the U.S. The poster suggests China charges a tariff of 67%, for instance, and that the U.S. will implement a 34% reciprocal tariff in response.
However, a report from the Cato Institute suggests the trade-weighted average tariff rates in most countries are much different than the figures touted by the Trump administration. The report is based on trade-weighted average duty rates from the World Trade Organization in 2023, the most recent year available.
The Cato Institute says the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate from China was 3%. Similarly, the administration says the EU charges the U.S. a tariff of 39%, while the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 2.7%, according to the report.
In India, the Trump administration claims that a 52% tariff is charged against the U.S., but Cato found that the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 12%.
Many users on social media this week were quick to notice that the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries. It’s an unusual approach, as it suggests that the U.S. factored in the trade deficit in goods but ignored trade in services.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative briefly explained its approach in a release, and stated that computing the combined effects of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in various countries “can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”
“If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the USTR said in the release.
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