THE BUSINESS OF MEDICINE

Written By Norbert Gleicher, MD, FACOG, FACS

How badly is the United Health Group in trouble?

How much trouble is the UnitedHealth Group (UHG) in? Probably more than anybody is currently thinking. Until recently, UHG was widely described as the biggest, most powerful, most aggressive, and most successful healthcare company (1); now, things look very different. Just a run of bad luck? We, and increasingly many experts, don’t think so!

That the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, one of the most important subdivision leaders in UHG, was brutally murdered in the streets of New York City by Luigi Mangione, a new folk hero for many, can still be viewed as coincidence and bad luck. But losing $280 billion in market capitalization literally within hours can no longer be considered bad luck alone. What came first was a very unexpected and troubling earnings report for the first quarter of 2025 by the company’s CEO, Andrew Witty, dropping the company stock by 22%. And then, 26 days later (on May 13, 2025), Andrew Witty unexpectedly resigned for “unspecified personal reasons.”

Coincidence?

The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets on the following day reported that the company was investigated by the Department of Justice for possible criminal Medicare fraud. And as the above-cited recent article in Yahoo! Finance noted, another reason was a huge increase in consumption of healthcare services by United-insured individuals, while competitors like Humana and Aetna did not record such an increase (1).

And then there is, of course, the conflict of interest that arises when one and the same company insures potential patients but also owns the medical practices that are providing this care. As it turns out, UHG currently directly employs or contracts with approximately 10% of all physicians in the U.S. If the owner of the insurance company can influence the medical provider organization—owned by the same company—to offer less medical care (in insurance parlance, also called “more efficient” care), profits and valuation of the insurance company, of course, soar, while the opposite will be the case in the provider organization.

One wonders, of course, which physician would want to work in such a provider company—unless, of course, the pay is really special! And just to close the circle, didn’t Luigi Mangione murder the CEO of UnitedHealthcare because the insurance company allegedly inappropriately denied healthcare coverage?

How bad are Kindbody’s troubles, - and has the company “found” its savior ?

And since we are already talking about being in trouble, that Kindbody is in trouble is not as surprising as the above-noted United news. That trouble was brewing at Kindbody has been known now for almost two years. We, in earlier postings of The Reproductive Times, repeatedly reported on those. They included noted failed efforts to raise a large additional funding round in 2023, and the failure of raising even only $50 million in 2024 (1), a not at all friendly article about the company, accusing Kindbody of having a “profit mindset” that pushes doctors to perform more egg retrievals (2), about egg donation “parties,” a quite unprecedented number of short-term CEOs, and a recent CEO trio of senior executives (forming an Office of the CEO) because no new single CEO could be recruited.

There are some interesting similarities between UnitedHealth Group and Kindbody, with the most consequential likely being that both organizations function as insurers as well as medical service providers. Like United, Kindbody therefore potentially faces significant ethical as well as practical-financial conflict situations.

Now two important new staffing announcements came from the company: The first was that Angeline N. Beltsos, MD, (we know her as Angie), after many years, left the company. In many ways, she was the embodiment of the early Kindbody because only through her merging with Kindbody a network of IVF clinics she had single-handedly built, starting in Chicago and then reaching out into the whole Midwest (Vios Fertility), did Kindbody become a behemoth in the infertility field. Serving as one of the CEOs of the company after the merger and then occupying several other senior management positions, she never gave up clinical practice. What made her finally leave the company was not announced—but the rumors are swirling.

And then an even bigger announcement, reported by Ron Shinkman in Inside Reproductive Health on June 12, 2025, in one of the usual emails by Griffin Jones to IVF clinics by this publication: Kindbody—after a very long search—finally found a new CEO, and as it turns out, it is David Stern, MBA, most recently the CEO of Boston IVF and one of the best and longest-known corporate administrators in the fertility field. We, indeed, still remember him well in his position as a Vice President at Serono USA and wish him good luck in his new position. He is one of those guys everybody likes and will take over the CEO position at Kindbody on July 7, 2025.

Stern appears to have all the qualifications to right the ship at Kindbody. As vice president at Serono, he served all U.S. IVF clinics and got to know the different practice models in the field. And more recently, as CEO at Boston IVF, he headed a truly historical provider organization in IVF. Boston IVF already in the 1990s pioneered large-scale insurance contracting in Massachusetts, then the first state to mandate that insurance companies cover IVF services. According to Shinkman, Stern’s tenure at Boston IVF ended in February of 2025, after he had negotiated the sale of the company to the private equity-owned IVI-RMA, which appointed Haryanto Hokianto as Executive Director of Boston IVF and Chief of Staff of IVI-RMA North America.

Kindbody (estimated annual revenue $180-$200 million) is, however, a much bigger company than Boston IVF (estimated annual revenue $75 million) and, because of the various businesses it pursues, also a much more complex company to run. Stern, therefore, will undoubtedly face new challenges.

According to the article by Shinkman, one of the first changes at Kindbody will be the elimination of the current Office of the CEO staffed by three co-CEOs: President Gina Bruzzichesi, Chief Financial Officer Scott Bruckner, and Chief Business Officer Shilpa Patel; but no further information was provided by the company regarding other expected administrative changes.

The troublesome rise in stem cell clinics in medicine, - now also starting to involve the infertility field

That treatments utilizing stem cells very likely will have a very important role to play appears to us obvious. Several remarkable therapeutic initial achievements have, indeed, already been reported, but—in principle—stem cell therapies uniformly must still be considered experimental and, therefore, should not be pursued in “fly-by-night” outfits in third-world countries. At the same time, charlatans and snake oil salesmen are ruling the current commercial world of stem cell therapy within the U.S. and—to even more significant degrees—just outside the borders of the U.S. in Canada, the Bahamas, and Mexico.

The highest concentration of stem cell therapy clinics can, indeed, be found in the U.S., Mexico, India, and China, and travel to receive stem cell therapies in foreign, distant lands is now called “stem-cell tourism” (1).

According to Google, in 2021, ca. 1480 U.S. businesses operated 2,754 clinics that directly marketed stem cell therapies. The proliferation of such clinics has, since, even further expanded at a logarithmic pace. And this expansion of unlicensed stem cell therapies is proceeding despite their incompatibility with FDA regulations (2). And we would also call for caution when locations of such therapies are advertised in the Grand Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, Panama, in Mexico, Albania, and even at times in Canada, because that often suggests that their offerings are too potentially toxic to even allow the FDA to ignore them (the FDA, of course, does currently ignore a quite unbelievable number of completely spurious stem cell offerings in the U.S.).

The global—presumably legitimate—stem cell market has been estimated to grow to approximately $930 million by 2031 (3). Clinically already reported and credible successes include, among others, cord blood stem cells that led to HIV remission and, in chronic heart failure, stem cells reducing the risk of heart attack or stroke by 58%, a figure that climbed to 75% in patients with high inflammation. Stem cells have also already been demonstrated to be effective in multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and in certain ocular disorders (4).

When it comes to infertility, Google unfortunately misleads when answering the question,

"Can stem cells cure infertility?"

with

"The course of stem cell treatment for female infertility allows restoring the ovulation cycle in women while also improving egg quality, uterine lining, fallopian tube blockage, and uterine fibroids."

This is, of course, a very wrong answer: Stem cells—as of the present time—have not been demonstrated to support any of these claims, and travel to Albania, the Bahamas, Panama, and/or any other countries—at least in the short-term—is not going to change this.

One more final word on this subject: As convinced as we are that effective stem cell therapies will in the not-too-distant future play an important role in medicine, one can also be convinced that stem cell therapies can also cause medical harm. One of the most dangerous potential complications shown in animal models has, for example, been cancer induction (5).

References

1.      The Conversation. July 14, 2023. https://theconversation.com/stem-cell-therapies-why-theyre-expensive-unproven-and-often-dangerous-206548

2.      Schneider ME. Regulatory Focus. November 4, 2021. https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2021/11/in-us-unlicensed-stem-cell-clinic-numbers-keep-cli

3.      Ogbonna N. Global RPh. March 7, 2025. https://globalrph.com/2025/03/stem-cell-therapy-success-rates-hit-78-new-research-reveals-breakthrough-results/

4.      American Parkinson Disease Association. July 3, 2024. https://www.apdaparkinson.org/article/understanding-stem-cell-therapy-in-parkinsons-disease-treatment/

5.      Seno et al., Oncol lett 2019;18(3):2756-2762

Norbert Gleicher, MD, FACOG, FACS
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