Finance
After cyberattack, Minnesota health care groups struggling with UnitedHealth financial aid
Emily Benson can see UnitedHealth Group’s headquarters from her office in Edina, but this close proximity hasn’t made it easy for her clinic to find emergency funding from the company.
Benson’s mental health practice submits bills through a UnitedHealth Group subsidiary that shut down its systems more than three weeks ago because of a cyberattack.
That’s left Benson and eight other therapists at Beginnings and Beyond Counseling with basically no revenue and reliant on a $40,000 loan she took out this month from UnitedHealth.
She resorted to this financing, which includes a $780 fee, because the company’s initial no-fee assistance program following the hack offered just $1,100 per week — a small fraction of the clinic’s claims total.
“They’re offering us money, but it’s such an insubstantial amount — such an unhelpful amount,” Benson said, while stressing that she values her relationship with both UnitedHealth and its beneficiaries. “I want to be honest about how much we’re struggling.”
Beginnings and Beyond is one of three Minnesota health care providers that told the Star Tribune this week they haven’t been able to use UnitedHealth’s financial aid programs to fully bridge a cash crunch that’s hitting thousands of hospitals and clinics across the country.
The cyberattack targeted Change Healthcare, a UnitedHealth subsidiary that runs a widely used clearinghouse for electronic claims data that processes 15 billion health care transactions annually and is involved in one out of every three patient records in the U.S. UnitedHealth Group is cooperating with a federal investigation into the cyberattack while scrambling to restore Change Healthcare systems that it shut down to contain the threat.
By week’s end, there were some signs of improvement for providers seeking financial help after the Star Tribune contacted Minnetonka-based UnitedHealth about all three situations.
For two small independent clinics in the Twin Cities, a UnitedHealth temporary assistance program launched March 1 evaluated need based on an assessment of historical claims that was far from complete. As a result, the sums offered were paltry compared with the need — a mismatch that has been reported in recent weeks by some other health care providers in Minnesota and across the country.
“We didn’t even bother to apply,” said Gretchen Moen, clinical director at Dakota Child and Family Clinic in Burnsville.
Late last week, UnitedHealth launched a new “last resort” funding program that’s designed to provide more help, particularly for small and regional health care providers.
“We are currently engaged with several thousand provider organizations to help them with their cash flow challenges, from large regional health systems to small, rural independent physician practices,” UnitedHealth said Friday in a statement to the Star Tribune.
At Robbinsdale-based North Memorial Health, where hundreds of millions of dollars worth of claims are in limbo, negotiations over financial assistance have been ongoing.
“The amounts offered … have been insufficient to resume normal cashflow operations,” the health system said in a Tuesday statement.
On Thursday, North Memorial added: “The conversations are fluid; we are hopeful for short-term, temporary resolution in the days ahead.”
The frustrations voiced publicly by some small clinics, and privately by some large health systems, reflect UnitedHealth’s challenge of quickly standing up assistance programs for the subset of health care providers that have been profoundly impacted. This includes health care providers and insurers that used on an exclusive basis the claims processing clearinghouse from Change Healthcare.
After the American Hospital Association slammed the company’s initial assistance program as insufficient, UnitedHealth responded March 7 with improvements including the last-resort funding mechanism, which offers help on a case-by-case basis for health care groups with no other options.
“We are determined to make things right as fast as possible,” UnitedHealth Group chief executive Andrew Witty said in a statement.
Amy Tannahill, a nurse practitioner with the Rosenberg Center in Roseville, said UnitedHealth’s initial program offered her practice a loan of just $90 per week — an amount she called “ridiculous,” since it wouldn’t even cover the cost of one standard office visit.
In lieu of the UnitedHealth offer, Tannahill and her fellow clinic owners are considering everything from dipping into personal savings to finding a lender that can provide more help. Closing temporarily is one option, but Tannahill says the clinic feels an obligation to keep taking care of patients.
Rosenberg Center offers services for children with developmental and behavioral needs.
“I would like to see [United] take serious ownership of this issue and advance payments immediately [for] providers and support staff who deserve to be paid for their work,” Tannahill said Tuesday via email. “This seems reasonable given that [United] had a profit of $22 billion last year.”
On Thursday, Rosenberg Center received a call from UnitedHealth offering more help.
“I told the rep that we have approximately $170,000 in claims and requested that amount,” clinic manager Mary Thissen Thompson wrote in an email Friday. “He took the information and said if it was approved we would see it … within five days.”
She added: “We would be completely shocked if they came through with that amount.”
At Beginnings and Beyond Counseling, Benson said her UnitedHealth representative contacted her Thursday about a $40,000 no-interest loan. She mentioned how she’d already borrowed that amount from a UnitedHealth loan program that’s been available for many years.
“I asked him to waive the [$780] fee I’m being charged for it in lieu of his offer. He said he’d have to escalate that request,” Benson said via email.
Benson’s first loan will only go so far. Another company representative on Thursday encouraged her to also apply for help through the new last-resort program, Benson said, but she provided a screenshot to the Star Tribune of the “Something went wrong” messages she received Friday morning when trying to do so.
“The page kept rejecting my request,” she said. “I tried three times.”
Some health care providers don’t have much patience for snags because they’ve already invested so much energy in recent weeks trying to use the claims submission “workarounds” that UnitedHealth has been touting.
Revenue at Benson’s practice has gone from about $70,000 per month to “basically zero,” because her health record system relies exclusively on the Change Healthcare clearinghouse for submitting bills. UnitedHealth Group has encouraged practices like hers to use alternate systems, but Benson says they aren’t viable.
She would have to download information on each patient visit and then submit data through a combination of electronic and manual steps depending on the health insurer. Benson tried doing this and found the process for submitting just one claim took about six to seven minutes.
“I’m a single mom with eight practitioners. It’s not feasible for me to do that,” she said. “I don’t have an administrative staff because I’m too small.”
An even bigger problem, she said, is that once the Change Healthcare system is restored, claims submitted through a workaround could trigger her health record to send a duplicate bill to patients for what they owe in cost-sharing. For now, Benson is not submitting any claims, saying she’ll wait for Change systems to resume, even though patients might then receive multiple bills for their cost-sharing all at once.
“We had to send out a letter to everybody we serve, which is about 250 clients, saying: ‘Hey, this is what’s happening right now, please be prepared for really large bills once this gets resolved because we’re not going to be able to stagger your payments,’” she said.
At North Memorial, the Change shutdown effectively halted all claims submissions and many electronic payments to the health system, said Nate Dell, the vice president of revenue cycle management.
Some funds are arriving based on claims submitted before the Feb. 20 attack, but this revenue is “declining precipitously,” Dell said.
“We’re sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars in unbilled accounts receivable,” he said in an interview last week.
Those bills carry values that are significantly larger than the sums that ultimately get paid, since insurers negotiate steep discounts off health system charges.
At North Memorial, patient care generates about $18 million in revenue per week. Financial reserves at the end of last year exceeded $300 million, according to a Star Tribune review of financial statements.
Even so, Dell said the systems outage has been “tremendously disruptive” for the health system, which employs about 5,000 people across two hospitals, more than a dozen clinics and a large EMS service.
“This is a hundred-year storm that no one plans for — that you can’t really insure yourself against,” he said.
Within the global manufacturing industry, maintaining a competitive edge requires a delicate balance between driving internal efficiency and fostering strong external relationships. For Applied Materials, a leader in materials engineering solutions for the semiconductor industry, this challenge became the foundation for a strategic finance transformation program, with an SAP Taulia solution emerging as a key enabler.
The journey began in early 2019 with the launch of Agile Finance, an end-to-end transformation initiative designed to support the company’s aggressive growth trajectory, which included a goal to double in size. The initiative was built around three strategic pillars: enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the finance organization, promoting career fulfillment, and establishing a robust digital operating model. The impact was significant, with the finance function achieving approximately 35% productivity gains in its labor force.
The third pillar—the move to a digital operating model—is where the partnership with SAP Taulia began.
“The SAP Taulia Dynamic Discounting solution was introduced not merely as a cost-cutting measure, but as a strategic tool to transform and digitize the interaction with Applied’s extensive, global supplier base,” Junaid Ahmed, corporate VP, Finance at Applied Materials, says. “We understood that to reap the benefits of digitization, we had to ensure the suppliers were on board. It needed to be a win-win outcome.”
Unprecedented flexibility for suppliers
The program empowers suppliers—thousands of them worldwide—to self-select which approved invoices they wish to discount for early payment. This is not a continuous, all-or-nothing commitment but rather a decision made on an invoice-by-invoice basis. This flexibility allows suppliers to manage their working capital needs with greater precision, taking advantage of early payment during their own critical periods, such as quarter-end or year-end, to help meet their own financial targets.
The system also drastically improves transactional efficiency. Suppliers no longer have to call Applied to track invoice status, approval, or payment date. All this information is available 24/7 in the SAP Taulia solution, reducing resource allocation on both sides and ensuring both reap the benefits of moving to an integrated, digital system.
Strategic benefits for Applied Materials
For Applied, the program is a testament to its focus on balancing efficiency with strong supplier relationships. The philosophy is a “win-win” built on a crucial spread: Applied Materials, as a Fortune 500 company with strong cash flow, has a significantly lower cost of capital than many of its suppliers. By funding the discounts, Applied captures a return—the discount income—while offering its suppliers funding at a rate close to their cost of capital, but with greater convenience.
This relationship-focused approach is critical. Applied’s supplier account managers actively support the program because they recognize its mutual benefit, not viewing it as a finance mandate to push costs onto the supply base.
Furthermore, the “dynamic” nature of the discount rates is a powerful risk mitigation tool. Unlike fixed contractual discounts, the rates can be adjusted in response to global economic changes, such as shifts in interest rates. When interest rates rose after the pandemic, Applied was able to adjust the discount rates accordingly with minimal pushback, as the core proposition remains the valuable spread between the parties’ cost of capital.
The SAP Taulia Dynamic Discounting solution has been rolled out globally, giving all suppliers the opportunity to use it. This has been critical over the last 12 months as many businesses around the globe have been subject to new and often unexpected tariff costs impacting their margin and their liquidity.
“The flexibility of the solution means suppliers can access funds when they need them, which helps them navigate some of the economic uncertainty that many businesses are facing,” Dirk Holoubek, managing director, Finance Shared Services, explains. “2025 saw a 23% increase in usage of the discounts, reflecting the pressures that suppliers are feeling right now on their cash flow.”
The solution’s capability to drive sophisticated analytics is also a major strategic asset. It helps provide insights into the different costs of capital between Applied and its supplier base. This data allows for targeted outreach and communication, ensuring that the offer of capital support is proactively extended to the suppliers that need it most.
The strategic value of the solution is further cemented by its ownership. The acquisition of Taulia by SAP brings several advantages.
“Trust is really important to both us and our suppliers,” Ahmed says. “For our suppliers to adopt a new solution, they need to know its technology they can rely on in the long term. Being part of SAP creates that assurance in the long-term future of the program.”
Looking forward, Applied Materials is already focused on the next stage of the transformation project: Agile Finance 3.0, which is focused on enabling the organization to become AI-first. The company is deploying a global, organization-wide AI assistant to drive personal productivity, but the strategic application of AI in the supplier management space is even more profound.
AI is expected to transform decision-making enablement by analyzing critical information and communicating effective options. In the future, AI will be able to proactively assess the specific needs and attributes of the supplier base, enabling Applied to address issues more quickly and resolve them earlier. The benefits are already tangible in e-invoicing: AI has made the solution more flexible and “human-like,” capable of reading minor changes in invoice format that would have previously caused electronic errors. This reduced rigidity and increased flexibility are directly contributing to the overall efficiency of the digital operating model.
By leveraging the SAP Taulia Dynamic Discounting solution, Applied Materials has not only digitized a process but also strategically transformed its financial operations, creating a system that is agile, resilient, and focused on maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with its global supplier ecosystem.
Cedric Bru is CEO of SAP Taulia.
Finance
Houston budget amendment would give financial assistance to help those impacted by a trash fee
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — Houston City Council could soon consider whether to offer financial assistance to help those who may struggle to afford a proposed trash fee.
This month, council will approve a budget. In it, Mayor John Whitmire doesn’t increase taxes.
However, he does want to charge a $5 monthly fee to cover trash services. A plan to help close the city’s nearly $200 million deficit that doesn’t add up to some.
Speaking in front of council on Wednesday, Super Neighborhood 64 president Lindsay Williams brought more than concerns, she had numbers surrounding the mayor’s proposed $5 monthly trash fee.
A plan his team says could climb to $25 a month by 2032. If it does, Williams told council that $300 annual cost would be just .15% of a $200,000 income.
For someone making $15,000, it’s two percent. “More than 13 times the burden for the same trash, same truck and same fee, but not the same pay,” Williams explained.
However, Controller Chris Hollins said the mayor’s not being truthful about the real cost.
“Houstonians are not stupid,” Hollins said. “We should not treat Houstonians like they’re stupid.”
Hollins said the cost may need to be $40 a month. Whitmire didn’t respond to Hollins during the meeting when he asked if he plans to increase the fee.
No matter the cost, some council members want to offer financial relief. Right now, there are no exceptions.
However, an amendment council will consider from Council Member Alejandra Salinas next week would change that.
“If they for whatever reason met the threshold and need an additional need because of the administrative fee, our amendment would allow them to apply for funds through the water fund,” Salinas said.
The trash fee wasn’t the only item from the mayor’s seven and a half billion dollar budget proposal that sparked debate. Hollins said a plan to divert money away from water utilities could drain a billion over the next five years from infrastructure money.
Whitmire disagrees saying there’s more than enough funds to handle the change, and continue with projects.
“We’ve all admitted the budget’s not perfect, but certainly it’s a first start that Houstonians understand and it’s a shame it’s being so politicized because it’s literally people’s lives and death,” Whitmire said.
Council will vote on amendments next week. It has to have a new budget in place by the end of the month.
Copyright © 2026 KTRK-TV. All Rights Reserved.
Reader question: My spouse has little interest in our financial position. As we age, this concerns me. I try to share some basic information (income, spending, account balances, debt, and so on) each month but rarely get a response. I think graphs or charts might be of more interest to her than a bunch of numbers. What recommendations would you have for illustrating our financial position so that I am not the only person aware of how we are situated? Thanks!
Answer: Your situation is pretty common. Most couples I know develop a division of labor over time, where one person is in charge of financial matters and the other person is less involved. That’s definitely the case for my husband and me. He’s in charge of paying all the monthly bills and preparing our tax returns, but the financial planning and investment decisions are up to me. This type of arrangement might work well for a long time, but can become less sustainable with age, particularly if the “finance person” in the relationship dies or develops a major health issue.
Online tools and mind maps
Illustrating your financial situation with charts and graphs is a great idea that might help your spouse become a little more involved. Morningstar’s Portfolio X-Ray tool includes a variety of images that help illustrate your financial situation. Websites for most major brokerage firms also include some visual tools. Schwab, for example, offers a Portfolio Checkup and a bar graph illustrating your account’s monthly income from dividends and interest income. Vanguard has a Portfolio Watch tool and a variety of performance illustrations, tools, and calculators.
A mind map, which we used with clients when I worked for a financial advisory firm, can be another way to picture your entire financial situation on one page. There are various softwaretemplates for drawing a mind map, or you can simply sketch it out with a large sheet of paper and a pencil. Start with your names at the center of the page. Then draw spokes connecting to various categories, such as names of other family members; investment accounts; real estate and other assets, insurance policies, estate plans, key goals and values, and contact information for accountants, estate planners, and other professionals. It can be helpful to go through the mind map together and make any updates needed at least once a year.
Other ways to communicate about money
A few other ideas—though not related to charts and graphs—might also be useful.
I like the idea of putting together a net worth statement that itemizes cash, taxable accounts, real estate, retirement accounts, and debt for each member of the couple as well as items owned jointly. It’s a good idea to update this document at least once a year and discuss it as a couple. If you set up the document as a spreadsheet, you can include columns with additional information such as account numbers, what each account is used for, which accounts are subject to required minimum distributions, or tax issues like potential capital gains.
Many couples also put together a binder (sometimes humorously called a “Doomsday Book”) that contains information about where to find important paperwork, insurance policies, how bills are paid, what each account is for, steps the surviving spouse will need to take, final wishes, and any other critical information.
A well-qualified financial adviser can bridge the information gap
Finally, you could consider working with a good financial adviser, who can help involve your spouse in financial matters while you’re still living and step in to fully manage investments and personal finance decisions if you pass away before your spouse. Make sure the adviser holds the Certified Financial Planner designation and charges fees that are reasonable. Although a 1% fee is still the industry standard for accounts of $1 million or less, it’s possible to find advisers who charge significantly less, including a few who price their services based on hours worked instead of a percentage of assets under management.
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This article was provided to The Associated Press by Morningstar. For more personal finance content, go to https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance.
Amy C. Arnott, CFA, is a portfolio strategist for Morningstar and co-host of The Long View podcast.
Related links:
What If This Turns Out to Be a Terrible Time to Retire?
https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance/what-if-this-turns-out-be-terrible-time-retire
Bill Bengen: ‘Inflation Is the Greatest Enemy of Retirees’
https://www.morningstar.com/retirement/bill-bengen-inflation-is-greatest-enemy-retirees
3 Big Questions to Ask Your Aging Parents
https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance/3-big-questions-ask-your-aging-parents
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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