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Health insurance stocks are sick today.
Pulled lower by UnitedHealth Group’s (UNH) paring back of its forecasts for 2025—the news has the giant’s shares down roughly 22% in recent action—the group is dropping Thursday. (Read Investopedia’s coverage of today’s trading here. The S&P 500’s health care sector was recently about 0.3% lower.
Several other big insurance firms joined UnitedHealth in the list of top S&P 500 decliners today. Humana (HUM), on the other hand, fell by nearly 7%. Elevance Health fell about 2% and CVS Health (CVS), 2.5%.
The Dow industrials also suffered from the news, UnitedHealth being a key component. The blue-chip index was recently down about 1%, while the S&P 500 was slightly higher. (Read more here about how the Dow functions.)
Six of the Dow’s 30 components were recently lower, but only a few—UnitedHealth, Amgen (AMGN), and Nvidia (NVDA)—were off more than 1%.
The news of drug trials lifted the stock price of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, which is also a health stock.
This article has been updated with more recent data on share prices and the market.
