COVID-19 Hangs Over Life, Health and Annuity Results: Q4 Earnings Calendar

By Allison Bell

News January 19, 2022 at 02:04 PM

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UnitedHealth Group on Wednesday started the life, health and annuity issuer earnings release season for the fourth quarter of 2021 — and its experience showed that the COVID-19 pandemic is still shaping how Wall Street sees the life and health world, almost two years after news reports about a strange disease outbreak in China began making news. The Minnetonka, Minnesota-based health insurance giant reported $4.2 billion in net income for the quarter on $74 billion in revenue. That's up from $2.2 billion in net income on $65 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2020. The fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, 2021. Executives said pandemic-related decreases in use of ordinary health care made up for higher COVID-19 care costs. But UnitedHealth executives themselves brought up the company's pandemic response efforts several times on a conference call the company held to go over the results, and analysts asked several times about the current COVID-19 surge and the new national home COVID-19 test kit distribution program. Some other publicly traded life, health and annuity issuers are set to announce fourth-quarter results later this month, but most have scheduled earnings release dates in February.

Public Companies

A publicly traded company, or public company, is a company that has stock in the hands of a large number of outside shareholders. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq require publicly traded companies to give investors reports on their performance, prepared under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles standards, every quarter. Public companies usually organize teleconferences for securities analysts, stream the teleconferences live on the web and post recordings of the teleconferences online. Agents, advisors and others can usually listen to a company's conference call livestream or recording by going to the investor relations section of the insurer's website. Many other insurers are privately held, meaning that they do not have shares of stock in the hands of large numbers of outside investors. Both those companies and the public companies file quarterly and annual financial statements, prepared using state insurance regulators' statutory accounting principles, every quarter. The California Department of Insurance posts the statutory financial statement filings in its insurance company profile database.

Earnings Release Dates

Here's a list that gives life, health and annuity insurers' and reinsurers' anticipated earnings release date, along with the stock symbols the companies use to identify themselves to investors. (This list will be updated over the next few days, as more earnings release dates come in.) Click on the stock symbol to see the company's SEC filing page. Jan. 19