UnitedHealthcare has agreed to pay a $2.5 million settlement as a resolution to a class action lawsuit, with those impacts possibly seeing payments up to $1,000.
A Washington federal judge granted preliminary approval last month for the settlement between the healthcare company and a class of Telephone Consumer Protection Act claimants. The settlement covers a class of over 12,000 individuals.
Here’s what to know about UnitedHealthcare’s class action lawsuit and how to file your claim before the deadline.
USA TODAY explained that a class action lawsuit involves one or more people suing for themselves and others with similar claims. Once a class action lawsuit is approved, every class member is awarded, except for anyone who opts out of the group.
The lawsuit claims that UnitedHealthcare violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, a federal law that prohibits companies from using an artificial or prerecorded voice message to make telemarketing calls without a recipient’s prior permission to do so.
According to Top Class Action,the settlement alleges UnitedHealthcare repeatedly made these calls even after class members requested to be removed from their call list.
“The parties reached the deal last month, proposing a $20,000 service award for lead plaintiff Frantz Samson, who brought the suit in 2019 accusing UnitedHealthcare Services Inc. of repeatedly calling him with marketing messages even after he informed the company it had the wrong number and requested to be removed from their call list,” the outlet writes.
According to the settlement, individuals who received one or more prerecorded phone calls between Jan. 9, 2015, and Jan. 9, 2019, from UnitedHealthcare’s Medicare and retirement non-licensed retention team, community and state national retention team, or Medicare and retirement collections team and were not a UnitedHealthcare member or third party authorized to receive such calls are eligible for payment.
Payments are estimated to be between $350 to $1,000 per individual, according to the settlement.
The final amount depends on the number of filed claims.
Eligible individuals would have received a settlement notice via email or mail informing them how to claim a payment. This notice would have included a unique login code and password to file the claim online.
Claims can be made online via an electronic form or by downloading and printing a PDF and mailing in the claim.
Claims must be submitted by Tuesday, April 15.
A court will still need to determine whether to grant final approval for the settlement on Friday, June 20.
This settlement follows a record-breaking data breach, in which about 190 million UnitedHealth Group customers may have been impacted.
Back in February 2024, Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of the behemoth global health company UnitedHealth, said officials became aware of the deployment of ransomware in its computer system and began taking steps to stop the hack.
The following month, they confirmed that a “substantial quantity of data had been exfiltrated from its environment between February 17, 2024, and February 20, 2024.”
Customer identifications, bank records and health data were exposed by hackers. Those affected have already been contacted and a final number of those impacted will be confirmed at a later date.
According to USA TODAY, the data breach disrupted the healthcare industry because doctors and hospitals were unable to collect payments for weeks when computer systems went down.
Contributing: Greta Cross, USA TODAY
