The last six months haven’t been easy for UnitedHealthcare, the United States' largest healthcare and health insurance provider. Starting with the assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare's health insurance conglomerate, the news and conversation surrounding the company has gone from bad to worse.
At Infegy's research team, we love using social intelligence provided by Infegy Starscape to evaluate how consumers perceive products, brands, and corporations. Typically, brands tend to be pretty resilient. Our research generally finds a happy ending where a brand makes a mistake and applies a fix that causes customers to return (see our brief on Southwest Airlines' Christmas collapse back in 2023).
Unfortunately, for UnitedHealthcare, we see none of those recovery indicators. After the assassination (the catalyst event), the social conversation around UnitedHealthcare has gone from bad to worse. It possibly suggests a flashpoint around the already negative perception Americans have towards their health insurance companies. Social intelligence from Infegy shows that after Brian Thompson's assassination, public opinion of UnitedHealthcare dropped sharply, making already negative feelings toward health insurance even worse. With financial troubles and federal investigations added in, the company is losing the trust it usually relies on to bounce back.
Before December 2024, social media users gave UnitedHealthcare little thought. The post volume around the brand increased to around 20,000 posts per month without much upheaval or controversy.
That changed abruptly after the alleged murder; Luigi Mangione stalked Thompson across the early-morning streets of Manhattan and executed him with a homemade pistol on December 4, 2024.
Figure 1 shows the significant post-event volume spike associated with UnitedHealthcare, which occurred during and immediately after the event, resulting in a 200-fold increase in attention compared to UnitedHealthcare's traditional moving average.
Moreover, we also observe elevated post volume after the fact, a characteristic fairly unique to this event. While UnitedHealthcare's volume didn't match the same elevated post-volume in the immediate aftermath of the murder, we still see a 10 times higher moving average post-volume than we did before the assassination.
Figure 1: Post Volume About UnitedHealthcare (May 2023 through May 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.
We not only saw a post volume spike post-Thompson's assassination. Figure 2 illustrates how this event represented a dramatic and durable shift in social media sentiment, where sentiment around UnitedHealthcare dropped from a moving average of approximately 60% net positive (e.g., three positive posts in five sentimental posts) to a moving average of around 17% net positive (e.g., one positive post in five sentimental posts).
This shift is a remarkable, durable sentimental shift and is quite atypical in terms of the trends we usually study. Typically, in the social space, sentimental swings, like post volume swings, are very reactive, meaning that if something bad (or good) happens, many people discuss it in the immediate aftermath but then quickly stop talking about it. In this case, that didn't happen. On the contrary, people are three times more likely to speak negatively about United Healthcare than positively post assassination.
Figure 2: Positive Share of Conversation About UnitedHealthcare (June 2023 through May 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.
Figure 3: Infegy’s Brand Risk Daily Power Ranking (June 2, 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.
UnitedHealthcare’s positioning on social media has been so bad for so long, that it’s been the top brand at risk according to our Brand Risk Dashboard since April 27, 2025 (and even before that). While the dashboard takes in the negative sentiment which we alluded to in Figure 2, it also incorporates a host of other negative indicators like discussions around illness or crime. Even more distressing for the whole healthcare industry, we also see Humana rise to the top of the rankings over the last week.
Now that we've uncovered two fairly atypical social patterns for a brand (protracted elevated post volume and prolonged negative sentiment) let's dive into Infegy's Topics, Narratives, and AI-enabled summaries to discover why this anomaly is happening.
First, let's shift the time frame a bit forward. Instead of examining the entire UnitedHealthcare timeline, let's focus on more recent social media conversations. We'll do this because the assassination-related discussion can serve as an outlier, which will overshadow the nuance surrounding more recent talks. (Removing outliers is a technique our research team has become well-practiced in after the COVID-19 pandemic, where running searches pre- and post-March 2020 often resulted in highly skewed results.)
Figure 3 shows a dramatic shift in the underlying conversation. Instead of the assassination-related discussions that dominated before (but shockingly don't appear now), we see extensive discussions about Medicare fraud, alluding to the US Department of Justice-led investigations in which UnitedHealthcare has been accused of potentially defrauding Medicare out of billions of dollars.
This shift represents a change where a negative conversational trend, started by Mangione's alleged murder, shifted towards more existential risks for the company.
Figure 4: Top Topics (colored by sentiment) related to UnitedHealthcare (April 29, 2025, through May 29, 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.
Another key factor driving UnitedHealthcare's prolonged reputational damage is its recent financial instability. Infegy's financial sentiment analysis layer reveals a stark downturn in investor confidence. Figure 4 highlights that since February 2025, UnitedHealthcare has become increasingly associated with terms like "missed earnings," "stock downgrade," and "executive sell-off." This language, combined with persistent negative sentiment, signals an erosion of trust not only among consumers but also among institutional investors and market analysts.
Figure 5: Topics Related to United Healthcare's Missed Earnings (April 29, 2025 through May 29, 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.
While healthcare stocks are typically seen as safe bets, especially for recession-conscious investors, UnitedHealthcare has bucked that trend. Their Q1 2025 earnings missed expectations, prompting a flurry of downgrades from analysts at firms like Morgan Stanley and Barclays. The stock suffered its largest one day drop in 26 years. Social media commentary among financial influencers and retail investors points to a broader concern: that the company's exposure to both legal risk (via DOJ investigations) and reputational toxicity has created a brand-level liability that's no longer "baked into the price."
Figure 6: AI Narrative Showing Conversation On Whether UnitedHealthcare’s Stock Will Recover (May 2, 2025 through June 2, 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.
UnitedHealthcare is navigating one of the most turbulent stretches in its corporate history, and social data suggests the company is still very much in the eye of the storm. What began as a shocking and rare catalyst, the assassination of a high-profile CEO has cascaded into a much broader crisis encompassing legal scrutiny, financial underperformance, and sustained public mistrust.
Infegy’s social intelligence platform reveals that this isn’t just a typical PR dip or an episodic controversy. Instead, we’re witnessing a rare convergence of sentiment, volume, and narrative trajectory that suggests long-term reputational damage.
What makes this case particularly alarming is the absence of any rebound signals. Brands typically recover once a news cycle cools down or once remedial action is taken. However, here, the conversation has not only persisted, but it has also evolved and intensified. The public has shifted from outrage over a singular event to sustained skepticism about the company’s ethics, leadership, and viability as a trustworthy healthcare provider.
For industry watchers, this case serves as a sobering reminder of how fragile brand equity can be when multiple crises strike in quick succession and how indispensable real-time social intelligence is for detecting and understanding such shifts. For UnitedHealthcare, the road to recovery looks long, uncertain, and increasingly uphill.
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