UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty will step down from his role at the top of the company due to personal reasons, the healthcare giant announced Tuesday morning.
Stephen Hemsley, who previously held the CEO title from 2006 to 2017, will succeed him. The change is effective immediately, according to the announcement.
Hemsley will also remain as chairman of UnitedHealth’s board of directors, with Witty taking on the role of senior adviser to the CEO.
“We are grateful for Andrew’s stewardship of UnitedHealth Group, especially during some of the most challenging times any company has ever faced,” Hemsley said in a press release. “The Board and I have greatly valued his leadership and compassion as chief executive and as a director and wish him and his family the best.”
Hemsley first came to UnitedHealth Group in 1997 as chief operating officer, and became president of the company in 1999. He has been chair of the company’s board since he left the CEO role in 2017.
Witty, meanwhile, became CEO of UnitedHealth Group in 2021 after serving as the CEO of its Optum unit. He was also previously the chief executive at drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline.
“Leading the people of UnitedHealth Group has been a tremendous honor as they work every day to improve the health system, and they will continue to inspire me,” Witty said in the announcement.
The company also revealed that it would suspend its 2025 outlook as utilization “continued to accelerate.” UnitedHealth said that the trend also expanded to more benefit offerings than it saw in Q1. It added that medical costs for Medicare Advantage members newly enrolled with UnitedHealthcare are also high.
It said it “expects to return to growth in 2026,” according to the announcement.
On a call with investors, Chief Financial Officer John Rex said that for the moment, the bulk of the impact around the utilization increase is in the UnitedHealthcare business, and that pausing the company’s guidance is a way to prepare now for signs that the effects may be spread beyond that segment.
He did not specify what the company is seeing in spaces beyond Medicare Advantage, such as Medicaid or the commercial insurance market.
Rex also downplayed the impact on Optum Health, though said that new patients there as well are presenting with higher acuity needs. However, he reiterated that the company is looking to get ahead of this trend now rather than allowing it to grow bigger.
Hemsley told investors that the company has already taken significant steps to get its arms around this utilization problem and arm itself with more precise data that enables its teams to address the challenge. Having that baseline makes it easier to predict performance, and puts the company on the path to return to its growth trajectory in 2026.
“There are a whole host of remedial responses in motion across this enterprise, on both the UnitedHealthcare side and the Optum side,” Hemsley said on the call. “We are gaining momentum on these things.
Elevated medical costs dragged UnitedHealth down in the first quarter, leading the company to post a rare miss. The Q1 earnings results were the latest downturn in a difficult year for the company, including the cyberattack on Change Healthcare and the murder of a leading executive, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Shares in UnitedHealth were down premarket given the news, dropping by about 2% from the previous closing price before markets open.