The Cigna Group is an American multinational for-profit managed healthcare and insurance company based in Bloomfield, Connecticut.[2][3] Cigna's insurance subsidiaries are major providers of medical, dental, disability, life and accident insurance and related products and services, the majority of which are offered through employers and other groups (e.g., governmental and non-governmental organizations, unions and associations).
Cigna is incorporated in Delaware.[4] The company ranked No. 15 in the 2023 Fortune 500 list of the largest U.S. corporations by total revenue,[5] and the company took 68th place in the 2023 Forbes Global 2000 ranking.[6] It has been embroiled in controversies, including engaging in automatic denials of insurance claims without reviewing them.
History
Cigna was formed by the 1982 merger of the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company (CG) and INA Corporation (the parent corporation of Insurance Company of North America, the first stock insurance company in America).[7] The company name, Cigna, is a mix of letters from the merging companies, CG and INA.[8] Insurance Company of North America was formed in 1792, while CG was created in 1865 by a special act of the Governor of Connecticut. In October 1871, the great Chicago Fire burned for two days, destroyed 2,000 acres, and left 100,000 people in Illinois homeless. INA paid $650,000, one of only 51 insurance companies (out of a total of 202) to pay claims in full.[9]
Cigna sold the majority of its life insurance operations to Lincoln National Corporation in 1997.[10][11]
Cigna Global Health Benefits
Cigna Global Health Benefits is a business unit within Cigna. The company is headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, close to Philadelphia. Additional Cigna Global Health Benefits operations are located in Visalia, California, and Greenock, Scotland and Shanghai, China and Antwerp, Belgium. Sales offices are located in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Products and services
CGHB global health plans typically include medical, dental, behavioral, and disability coverage, as well as business travel and life insurance components. Expatriates are defined as employees of multinational companies who work outside their home country on short- or long-term international assignments.[34] CGHB maintains its own, in-house international claims platform, and offers a network of physicians and hospitals for its members (including 550,000 in the U.S. and more than 141,000 outside the U.S.).
Public relations and lobbying
Cigna spent more than $4.4 million from 2005 to 2009 on lobbying to attain legislation that the company favors. This includes $720,000 spent in 2009 alone, when it had 20 lobbyists at five firms working on its behalf.[35]
In 2008, the head of Cigna's public relations, Wendell Potter, resigned, becoming a whistleblower who gave testimony in 2009 to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in favor of reform of the health care industry.[36]
Controversies
Automatically rejecting claims with no review
In 2023, Cigna was criticized for allowing company doctors to reject claims even if they had not opened the patient's file. The company was found to be using a system, "PXDX," that, according to ProPublica, "saved money in two ways. It allowed Cigna to begin turning down claims that it had once paid. And it made it cheaper to turn down claims, because the company's doctors never had to open a file or conduct any in-depth review. They simply denied the claims in bulk with an electronic signature."[37] The speed with which denials were placed was termed internally as "click and close."[38]
Nataline Sarkisyan liver transplant case
In December 2007, Cigna refused to pay for a liver transplant of a California teenage girl, Nataline Sarkisyan, coming under scrutiny as a result. There was a liver ready and waiting to be transplanted, and doctors estimated she had a 65% chance of surviving at least six months.[39]
Evaluations
Cigna received gold in the 2009 Gartner & 1to1 Customer Experience Excellence Award. The awards are given to the companies that "most clearly demonstrate exemplary customer relationship strategy and an unrivaled level of excellence in delivering the customer experience".[49]
In January 2010, Cigna received the JD Power award for customer service for all of its call centers for the fourth time in a row.[50]
In 2011, the California Nurses Association determined that Cigna denied roughly 39.6% of all claims (compared to competitors such as Aetna, who denied about 5.9% of all claims in the same time frame).[51]
Strategic alliances
On April 16, 2010, Cigna announced an alliance with Humana group to offer a streamlined Medicare Advantage offering through employer clients for retirees.[52] In November 2023, Reuters reported that Cigna and Humana were in talk to merge, in a deal totalling $60 billion.[53] In December 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that merger talks ended.[54][55]
In November 2011, Cigna and TTK Group, an Indian business conglomerate focused on healthcare, formed a joint venture called Cigna TTK to develop a health insurance business in India, subject to obtaining government approvals.[56]
See also
- List of United States insurance companies
External links
References
- 2024 Annual Report (Form 10-K) U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, February 27, 2025^
- Jakob Emerson. 'The house always wins': Insurers' record profits clash with hospitals' hardship Becker's Payer Issues, Becker's Healthcare, 3 January 2023, retrieved 3 April 2023^
- Contact Us – Customer Service – Cigna