Alex Shteynshlyuger, a urologist with a practice in New York City, feels surrounded by UnitedHealth Group. He has seen the company gobble up private practices and says it's slow to pay claims. It also started offering cash-flow services that, Shteynshlyuger says, feel a lot like payday loans.

UnitedHealth Group is the largest employer of physicians in the United States. And it’s growing.

Has the company become too big?

In this episode of "An Arm and a Leg," host Dan Weissmann looks into this "behemoth" company and the obstacles antitrust regulators face in keeping up with its rapid growth.

Note: "An Arm and a Leg" uses speech-recognition software to generate transcripts, which may contain errors. Please use the transcript as a tool but check the corresponding audio before quoting the podcast.

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.