UnitedHealthcare, with its extensive national coverage and high trustworthiness score, tied for No. 1 on Insure.com’s 2025 Best Health Insurance Companies list – earning 4.17 stars out of 5.
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If you’re looking for an insurer with extensive national coverage and strong financials, UnitedHealthcare is worth considering.
UnitedHealthcare earned the top spot overall (tied with Kaiser Permanente) in Insure.com’s ranking of the Best Health Insurance Companies of 2025 with a star rating of 4.17 out of 5.
In our survey of health insurance consumers, UnitedHealthcare scored at the top in more than one category – including being rated the most trustworthy. The company also scored well in the renewal category. However, UnitedHealthcare didn’t do nearly as well in the categories for low deductibles and needing referrals.
The company earned an A+ (Superior) rating from AM Best, which measures financial stability, and received a high National Committee for Quality Assurance rating – 3.42 out of 5 stars. NCQA evaluates healthcare organizations on, among other things, member satisfaction.
Among companies we ranked, UnitedHealthcare received one of the best complaint index scores from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, a 0.24. The NAIC ranks insurers by the number of customer complaints they receive. A market average is 1.0, and anything less indicates the carrier receives fewer complaints than typical for a company its size.
UnitedHealthcare, according to an American Medical Association report released in December 2024, is also the nation’s largest health insurer with 15% of the market.
AM Best's Financial Strength Rating is an independent opinion of an insurer's financial strength and ability to meet its ongoing insurance policy and contract obligations.
Below is Insure.com’s review of the company. It’s based on third-party metrics and an in-depth survey of insurance customers. Find the full methodology here, including an explanation of our survey scores.
UnitedHealthcare plans are likely available no matter where you live across the country and customers ranked it high for affordability – with 4-plus stars. But some other competitors did better. Molina led this category.
UnitedHealthcare doesn’t always come in as the cheapest, but its rates are often comparable to other insurers. Below is just one example of how some UnitedHealthcare HMO rates compare with those of other health insurers for a similar plan. These are 2025 healthcare exchange rates in New Mexico for a single, 40-year-old male in excellent health with an annual income of $70,000.
UnitedHealthcare’s customers think it does a decent job of delivering customer satisfaction, but in this category it finished in the second half of the insurers we ranked. Molina and Elevance scored the highest for customer satisfaction in our 2025 study.
In J.D. Power’s 2024 U.S. Commercial Member Health Plan Study, UnitedHealthcare saw varying scores based on region. The company ranked above average in roughly half of the states where it sells coverage. In the other locations, it was rated below average. In California, the average score was 578.
UnitedHealthcare scored near the bottom of our 2025 study for policy offerings. Only 77% of respondents said the company had a good breadth of policy offerings. The leaders in this category were Molina and Elevance.
Yes, they would, with 94% of its customers saying they would recommend the company to others. The only insurance company that scored higher than UnitedHealthcare in this category was Highmark.
UnitedHealthcare is the most trustworthy health insurance company in 2025, according to the insurance customers we surveyed. Humana came in second in this category
Yes. When asked if they planned to renew with UnitedHealthcare, 88.7% of customers said they would. Only Molina had a higher score, 89.2%, for renewals.
UnitedHealthcare didn’t score well for digital experience. Only 74% of customers were satisfied with the company’s mobile and web capabilities. Molina led this category.
A deductible is the amount of money you have to pay out-of-pocket for health care services before your health insurance plan begins to pay. The winner in this category was Molina, followed by Humana. Other companies did better than UnitedHealthcare in this category as well.
A healthcare provider network is a group of doctors, specialists and hospitals that provide services to insured members at a lower cost than providers outside the network. A strong provider network can be a key consideration when shopping for a health plan. Even though UnitedHealthcare has one of the largest provider networks, customers didn’t give it especially high marks here. Elevance and Humana took the top spots in this category.
UnitedHealthcare is the largest health insurance provider in the country by membership, but surprisingly, its roots don’t go back as far as some of its other well-known competitors. In 1974, Richard Taylor Burke founded Charter Med Inc. in Minnetonka, Minn. In 1977, the UnitedHealthcare Corp. was created to reorganize the company and became the parent of Charter Med. It became an acquirer of other healthcare companies, fueling rapid growth over the next few decades. In 2005 it acquired PacifiCare Health Systems, which came with a pharmaceutical operation. That business was later rebranded OptumRx. It now boasts about 50 million members and has a provider network that includes some 7,000 hospitals and more than 1.3 million physicians and other healthcare professionals. Its various health offerings include individual, family, employer and Medicare and Medicaid.
Sources:
UnitedHealthcare “UnitedHealthcare website and UnitedHealth Group” Accessed March 2025.
Insure.com in the fall of 2024 surveyed more than 1,750 insurance consumers (almost 1,500 of which had health insurance). The survey was conducted by online market research company Slice MR.
Respondents were asked to name their health insurer and then grade it in a number of categories, including:
The percentage of respondents who said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their insurer is presented in the results.
We then asked respondents to provide a yes or no response to indicate their agreement with the following statements:
The percentage of respondents who said yes is presented in the results.
The editors compiled the survey results and then selected – based on the number of survey responses – the top companies for further evaluation.
We then collected data from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), which evaluates and rates health plans, and National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ complaint data, which ranks a company by the number of customer complaints it receives. The Insure.com team identified the NAIC codes of each underwriting company for each carrier and calculated a weighted average complaint index, weighted by the annual written premium. The associated NAIC complaint index score was used in the calculations.
With the help of Prof. David Marlett, Ph.D., Managing Director of the Brantley Risk and Insurance Center at Appalachian State University, the editors created a rating system to determine which insurance companies were best in each sector. For life insurers, we took the following and gave each a weight.
Each insurer was awarded between half a star and 5 stars. No company in the ranking received less than half a star in any category, and 5 stars was the most any insurer could receive.