A serious cyber attack has hit an important part of the US health care system

Health-care hack spreads pain across hospitals and doctors nationwide One of the most serious cyberattacks to hit the health-care system in U.S. history is threatening the solvency of some hospitals, officials say. The Washington Post

The fallout from the hack of a little-known but pivotal health-care company is inflicting pain on hospitals, doctor offices, pharmacies and millions of patients across the nation, with government and industry officials calling it one of the most serious attacks on the health-care system in U.S. history.

The Feb. 21 cyberattack on Change Healthcare, owned by UnitedHealth Group, has cut off many health-care organizations from the systems they rely on to transmit patients’ health-care claims and get paid. The ensuing outage doesn’t appear to affect any of the systems that provide direct, critical care to patients. But it has laid bare a vulnerability that cuts across the U.S. health-care system, frustrating patients unable to pay for their medications at the pharmacy counter and threatening the financial solvency of some organizations that rely heavily on Change’s platform.

Change Healthcare is a juggernaut in the health-care world, processing 15 billion claims totaling more than $1.5 trillion a year, the company says. It operates the largest electronic “clearinghouse” in the business, acting as a pipeline that connects health-care providers with insurance companies who pay for their services and determine what patients owe. It supported tens of thousands of physicians, dentists, pharmacies and hospitals, handling 50 percent of all medical claims in the United States, the Justice Department wrote in a 2022 lawsuit that unsuccessfully tried to block UnitedHealth from acquiring the company.

Citing internal company documents, prosecutors wrote that Change had concluded that the “health care system … would not work without Change Healthcare.

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The hackers, a ransomware gang once thought to have been crippled by law enforcement, stole data about patients, encrypted company files and demanded money to unlock them. The company shut down most of its network in February as it tries to recover.

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Quantifying the impact remains a moving target, with the severity depending on how much organizations relied on Change. But three senior officials at the Department of Health and Human Services described it as serious.

Adding to the urgency was Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, who sent a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Friday, asking it to make accelerated payments to hospitals, pharmacies and other providers who have been impacted by the outage. Patients can’t get information on whether insurance will cover a treatment, while hospitals are struggling to bill patients and receive payments, the New York Democrat wrote.

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