The Brief

One year after UnitedHealthcare's CEO was shot and killed, the crisis in U.S. health care has gotten even worse — in ways both obvious and hidden.

People increasingly can't afford health insurance. The costs of both Obamacare and employer-sponsored insurance plans are set to skyrocket next year, in a country where health care is already the most expensive in the developed world.

Yet even as costs surge, the companies and the investors who profit from this business are also struggling financially. Shares in UnitedHealth Group, the giant conglomerate that owns UnitedHealthcare and that plays a key role in the larger stock market, have plunged 44% from a year earlier. (It was even worse before a rally in UnitedHealth shares on Wednesday.)

"UnitedHealth's reputation in the investment community, before December 4 last year, was [as] a safe place to put your money. And that basically got all blown up," says Julie Utterback, a senior equity analyst who covers health care companies for Morningstar.

Then, on Dec. 4, 2024, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot on a Manhattan street on his way to an investor event. The shocking act of violence sparked a widespread consumer outcry over U.S. health care costs and denied claims, and plunged UnitedHealth Group into a public relations disaster.

But that was only the start of the business woes for the company and its entire industry — which are facing regulatory scrutiny, tightening margins, and investor skepticism. Many of UnitedHealth's top competitors have also seen their shares suffer in the past year, at a time when the stock market in general has been hitting tech-driven record highs. The S&P 500's healthcare index has lagged the larger market. And some Wall Street analysts are bracing for another rocky year in the business of health care.

"Near term, there's a lot more volatility to come," says Michael Ha, a senior equity research analyst who covers health care companies for investment bank Baird.

Dec. 4 started to reveal the depth of U.S. health care problems

This wide-ranging crisis for both consumers and businesses underlines the brokenness of the U.S. health care system: When neither the people it's supposed to serve nor the people making money from it are happy, does it work at all?

"We're really at an inflection point," says Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the author of a book about the insurance industry.

"Every segment of the health insurance business right now is stressed," she adds.

These stresses became brutally visible a year ago — and persist today. Luigi Mangione, the 27-year-old suspect in Thompson's killing, was in court this week for hearings ahead of his trial.

But the crisis in U.S. health care is much bigger than his case. Here are three main ways it's playing out this year, from Main Street to Wall Street.

Prices are going up — and people are getting ready to go without medical care

No matter how you get your health insurance, it will likely cost more next year.

For the roughly 24 million people who get their insurance through the government's health care exchanges, Affordable Care Act subsidies are set to expire at the end of the year — sending premiums soaring. Another 154 million people are insured through their employers — and premiums for those plans are also set to skyrocket.

Costs are increasing for several reasons: Drug companies have developed more effective cancer treatments and weight-loss drugs, which they can charge more for. More people are going back to the doctor after the pandemic kept them away, which is creating more demand and allowing providers and hospitals to increase prices. And some hospitals, doctors' offices, insurance companies and other businesses within the health care system have merged or consolidated, often allowing the remaining businesses to raise prices for their services.

The end result is that nearly half of U.S. adults expect they won't be able to afford necessary health care next year, according to a Gallup poll published last month.

Jennifer Blazis and her family are among them.

"It just always blows me away, how much I have to consider cost when something happens with the kids," the 44-year-old nonprofit worker and mother of four told NPR this fall in an interview for its Cost of Living series.

Blazis and her family live in Colorado Springs and get their insurance through her husband's small property-management business. She says she's postponing leg surgery that would address a condition that's causing her pain, but which her doctors say is not yet urgent.

"We wait to go to the doctor because we know if we do, we're going to get hit with just a massive bill," Blazis says. "And this is with … a really good health insurance plan that our [family] company pays a ton of money for."

Yet even the biggest businesses selling these services are struggling

Some of those increased costs are also hitting insurers — even the ones that also control other parts of the health care ecosystem.

UnitedHealth Group is far more than just the owner of the largest U.S. health insurance company. It's one of the largest companies in the world, and it's involved in almost every part of how Americans access health care — from employing or overseeing 10% of the doctors they see to processing about 20% of the prescriptions they fill.

It's also one of the most influential stocks on Wall Street. UnitedHealth Group is one of 30 companies that makes up the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average — so what happens with its shares helps determine what happens with the overall stock market.

The company has had a miserable year on both fronts. The reasons come down to profits, more than PR: UnitedHealth and its competitors have been facing rising costs in the Medicare Advantage businesses that allow private insurers to collect government payments for managing the care of seniors.

These programs were once widely seen as moneymakers for big health insurers, but now they've gotten UnitedHealth embroiled in financial and regulatory trouble, including a Department of Justice investigation into its Medicare business. The company abruptly replaced its CEO in May, a few months before it acknowledged that it was facing the government probe.

Now UnitedHealth is trying to get rid of about 1 million Medicare Advantage patients — and otherwise move on from the past year's many problems.

"We want to show that we can get back to the swagger the company once had," Wayne DeVeydt, UnitedHealth's chief financial officer, told investors last month.

One prominent investor is betting it can: In August, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that it had bought more than 5 million shares in UnitedHealth Group. The news helped lift the stock from its depths — but it still has a long way to go for both its share price and its profits to recover from this year's slump.

Chief Executive Stephen Hemsley acknowledged as much in October, promising investors "higher and sustainable, double-digit growth beginning in 2027 and advancing from there."

Spokespeople for UnitedHealth declined to comment for this story.

Wall Street used to think health care was safe. It's waiting for a turnaround

Health care spending accounts for about a fifth of the U.S. economy, making the for-profit companies that earn this money some of the most powerful in the world.

That's helped their appeal to investors, who traditionally tend to consider health care stocks "defensive," or safe, investments. That appeal sometimes overrides the industry's current financial challenges: In the past month, as Wall Street had its now-quarterly panic over the artificial intelligence bubble, health care stocks actually outperformed the broader market for a few weeks.

Still, health care is massively lagging the market in the long term.

Morningstar's Utterback is optimistic that the industry can eventually turn around its deeper financial, regulatory and reputational problems. She even calls most health care stocks "undervalued" currently — but she warns that investors will have to have a lot of patience if they want to see bets on the sector pay off.

"My explicit forecast period is 10 years. It's not three," she says. "There's a murky outlook here for the next couple years, at least."

Copyright 2025 NPR

It’s been four years since James Oreste started Ubefest, a festival meant to highlight the purple yam that’s become beloved not just in the Filipino diaspora but across the country. In that time, the food festival has grown in the number of vendors and become a broader appreciation of Filipino cuisine.

The restaurant:

This year's event is happening Saturday April 11 and Sunday April 12 in Cerritos. One of the festival’s vendors, Emerson Baja, owner of Long Beach Lumpia, has been involved with the event for years, and he came into the studio to talk to host Austin Cross.

The food:

Baja’s pop-up menu was inspired by a variety of things, with the traditional aspects of his menu coming from his family and other aspects by food he experimented with while attending Long Beach State. He became a probation officer after he graduated college, but his heart was always with food, specifically lumpia, which he served at a potluck.

“People were like ‘you’re in the wrong business,’” Baja said.

For the segment, Baja brought in a variety of lumpias: traditional Shanghai; pork chile verde; veggie pancit pizza; and ube cheesecake turon.

The verdict: 

When Emerson mentioned the Shanghai lumpia being a homemade recipe, Cross added, “Home is delicious! You have a home like this?”

“It’s finger-licking good over here,” Cross said after his first bite of the ube cheesecake turon lumpia. He added: “It’s really special because it has an aftertaste of a very heartwarming pastry…feels very homey.”

Listen to the full conversation here:

President Donald Trump has endorsed Steve Hilton for California governor, a move that could possibly consolidate Republican voters ahead of the still wide-open primary election in June.

Hilton, a former Fox News host based in the Bay Area who previously served as a political adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron, has campaigned on the goal of improving California’s hostile relationship with the federal administration. He and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco are the only two Republicans among the 10 notable candidates in the primary field.

“I have known and respected Steve Hilton, who is running for Governor of California, for many years. He is a truly fine man, one who has watched as this once great State has gone to Hell,” Trump wrote early Monday on his social media site, Truth Social. “Steve Hilton has my COMPLETE & TOTAL ENDORSEMENT. He will be a GREAT Governor and, importantly, WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!!!”

With Democratic voters split, Hilton and Bianco have risen to the top of public polling in the race, threatening to leave the majority party in the state without a candidate in the top-two general election. Now, Trump’s endorsement could boost Hilton and allow a Democrat to overtake Bianco.

“It certainly increases the chances that a Democrat is going to make it into the top two,” said Tim Rosales, a Republican strategist. “The Bianco campaign has to reassess and reposition themselves in the wake of this, but the Democrats still don’t have a clear front-runner.”

In the most recent public polling, Hilton and Bianco have occupied a crowded top five alongside three Democrats: Rep. Eric Swalwell, investor Tom Steyer and former Rep. Katie Porter.

Hilton and Bianco often split the Republican Party’s support about evenly in polling, and a March primary election simulator created by Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc., put the odds of a Republican-only general election at about 25%.

If that were the case, the state would have a Republican governor for the first time in more than two decades.

In an interview with KQED’s Political Breakdown, Hilton touted his relationship with U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and vowed to work collaboratively with the Trump administration to boost California’s timber industry and manage forests.

“There’s a whole set of positive things we can do if we work more closely with the federal government on that issue,” he said.

While he told Politico that as of last week, he hadn’t spoken to Trump about the gubernatorial race, he’s repeatedly invoked the president’s own campaign slogan, saying that as governor, he would “Make California Great Again.”

Trump remains deeply unpopular in California, with just 30% of likely voters approving of the job he is doing as president, per a February poll from the Public Policy Institute of California. But that same survey found Trump’s support remains strong among California Republicans, with 76% approval.

“Republican voters still hold the president in pretty high regard,” Rosales said. “It certainly does make Hilton the front-runner amongst Republicans, and in a top-two primary like this, where you’ve got a crowded field, anything that a candidate can do that really solidifies a base of voters is critically important.”

The loyalty of the GOP base has allowed Trump to play kingmaker in past California primary elections. In 2018, he endorsed businessman John Cox, boosting Cox into the general election and dashing the prospects of an all-Democrat general election between Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Before Trump’s overnight endorsement, Bianco also seemed to have been courting the president’s support, launching a high-profile recount of ballots cast in last November’s special election, when California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50 to redraw congressional maps to favor Democrats. Last month, Bianco seized more than 650,000 ballots, calling the unprecedented investigation a “fact-finding mission” into potential voter fraud, which Trump has often called rampant despite a lack of evidence.

Many Republican strategists, however, believed that the party’s best chance to win both spots in the primary relied on Trump’s staying out of it. The state’s GOP also hasn’t weighed in, though it’s expected to decide whether to make an endorsement at its upcoming convention next weekend.

Now that celebrity bald eagles Jackie and Shadow have welcomed two new chicks, tens of thousands of fans are regularly tuning into the livestream of the nest overlooking Big Bear Lake for a peak at the fuzzy eaglets.

The chicks, which hatched Saturday night and Easter Sunday morning, will be referred to as Chick 1 and Chick 2 for now, according to Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit that runs the popular YouTube livestream.

The eaglets are still gaining strength in their first few days of life — learning to move neck muscles and pick up pieces of meat from mama Jackie and papa Shadow’s beaks. Those early feedings can be challenging or awkward, and the organization often refers to the chicks as “bobbleheads” at this stage.

Some fans worried about the second chick struggling to hold its head and getting enough food, but both eaglets are doing “great,” according to Jenny Voisard, Friends of Big Bear Valley’s media manager.

“Trust the process, trust the eagles, and settle in and enjoy these cute little fur balls because they change every day,” Voisard said. “And you don't want to miss this time, because they're just so precious.”

Sibling 'bonking'

The eaglets are tiny — each weighs about a few ounces — in a nest that’s estimated to be 6-feet deep. The nest sits near the top of a Jeffrey pine tree on the north side of Big Bear Lake.

Chicks multiply in size over the first weeks and months of life, establishing a pecking order along the way, according to the nonprofit.

Viewers may notice Chick 1 and Chick 2 headbutting each other, a sibling rivalry behavior that the organization calls “bonking.” Voisard said it’s “totally normal” in the nest, especially since the chicks can’t see very well at this stage.

“It won't last too long,” she said. “There is plenty of food for them to eat, and so they shouldn't be in competition with each other.”

Last season’s trio of chicks participated in bonking for a while.

Voisard said Sunny and Gizmo went on to be “best friends” before they flew away from the nest last June. One of last season’s chicks, which the nonprofit named “Misty,” didn’t survive a winter storm within weeks of hatching.

For Jackie and Shadow, everything now revolves around stocking up food and making sure the chicks are safe, warm and dry in the nest, Voisard said.

“They do a very good job, and we've been seeing fish deliveries and other prey the last couple of days and the chicks are hungrily gobbling it up,” she said.

Upcoming naming contest

Now that the chicks have hatched, many people are wondering what their names will be — and offering suggestions. The nonprofit said it’s seen hundreds of requests to name one of the chicks “Sandy” in honor of Sandy Steers.

Steers was an environmental advocate who helped launch the eagle livestream and the late executive director of Friends of Big Bear Valley. She died in February, a few weeks before the pair of eggs were laid.

But the organization said that’s not what Steers would have wanted. Voisard said Steers loved having Big Bear third-grade students select the eaglets’ names, and Friends of Big Bear Valley plans to keep the tradition going.

“We are working on a way to honor, memorialize Sandy in something that’s more permanent,” Voisard said.

The naming privileges are usually given to the third-graders because they study bald eagles in school, but last year was a bit of an exception. The fourth- and fifth -grade classes were invited to help select names because Jackie and Shadow didn’t have chicks in 2023 and 2024, when the students would've been in third-grade.

"We want to make sure we're doing it the way that [Steers] wanted to do it, and those kids live for being able to do this,” Voisard said. “It's a right of passage.”

Friends of Big Bear Valley is expected to launch a naming contest where the public can submit ideas for this season’s eaglets, and the details will be announced online. A random list of names will be pulled from the submissions and shared with Big Bear third-grade students for the final vote.

Chick 1 and Chick 2 will then be officially named based on the results of the students’ ballots.