UnitedHealth Raises Its Profit Forecast for a Third Time as J&J Beats, Too

By The News Desk, Previously

October 13, 2026

UnitedHealth beat estimates and raised its 2026 profit forecast for a third time as its turnaround gains steam, while Johnson & Johnson beat too — and fell anyway.

If you want a single morning that sums up American healthcare in 2026, Tuesday will do nicely. UnitedHealth Group, the industry's giant and its most closely watched turnaround project, beat expectations and raised its full-year profit forecast for the third time this year. Johnson & Johnson beat expectations too — and its stock fell anyway, because the details underneath were a map of every pressure bearing down on global healthcare at once: drug patent cliffs, a war redrawing health budgets on another continent, and austerity in Europe. Two beats, two very different moods.

UnitedHealth Raises the Bar a Third Time

Reuters reported that UnitedHealth posted third-quarter adjusted earnings of $4.69 a share, comfortably ahead of the $4.14 average estimate tracked by LSEG and far above the $2.92 it earned a year earlier. On a GAAP basis, earnings were $4.56 a share with net income of $4.11 billion, and revenue of $112.7 billion came in just slightly below the $113.2 billion of a year ago. The number that tells the real story sits one line down: earnings from operations jumped to $6.6 billion from $4.3 billion, the clearest sign yet that the company's core machine is working again.

The guidance raise is the headline, though. UnitedHealth now expects full-year 2026 adjusted profit of at least $20.50 a share — its third increase to the forecast this year — up from a prior floor of $19.50 to $20 and above the $19.86 analysts had been modeling, according to Reuters. Companies do not raise a forecast three times in a year by accident. They do it when quarter after quarter lands better than feared, and when management wants the market to stop pricing the company like it's still in crisis. The shares rose in premarket trading.

The Turnaround, in the Numbers

The engine of the improvement is medical costs finally behaving. Reuters reported UnitedHealth's medical cost ratio — the share of premiums paid out for care — was 88.4% in the quarter, improved from 89.9% a year earlier. In health insurance, a point and a half on that ratio is an enormous amount of money, and it is the metric that blew up the company's results during its worst stretch. Both halves of the business contributed: the UnitedHealthcare insurance arm produced $2.8 billion in operating earnings, up from $1.8 billion, on $86.3 billion of revenue, while the Optum services arm earned $3.7 billion, up from $2.5 billion. Cash flow from operations was $5.1 billion.

Context matters here, and Reuters supplied it: this is a two-year climb back from a brutal sequence — a record cyberattack on the company's technology unit, missed financial targets, a withdrawn outlook, and the killing of a top executive outside the company's investor day nearly two years ago. Against that history, a boring, profitable quarter with a raised forecast is not boring at all. It is the point. Mizuho analyst Ann Hynes, cited by Reuters, focused on exactly that — the durability of the margin recovery — which is analyst language for the only question that matters: is this fixed, or is it a good quarter wearing a costume? Three forecast raises in a year is management's answer.

J&J Beats — and the Market Shrugs

Johnson & Johnson's morning was the mirror image: good numbers, grumpy reception. Reuters reported third-quarter revenue of $25.4 billion against an LSEG estimate of $25.28 billion, and adjusted earnings of $2.59 a share against $2.54 expected. Pharmaceutical sales rose 7.7% to $16.76 billion. And still the shares fell more than 2% before the opening bell, because investors read past the beat and into the mix.

The drug business is a tale of two medicines. The psoriasis and Crohn's treatment Tremfya surged 68% to $2.4 billion in sales, well above the roughly $2.19 billion expected — a genuine star. Stelara, the older blockbuster it is succeeding, fell 54% to $716 million as generic competition bites, though even that was ahead of the $591 million analysts feared. The cancer drug Darzalex grew 16% to $4.24 billion, a touch light versus the $4.4 billion expected. That is the pharmaceutical business in one paragraph: the future arriving fast, the past expiring faster, and the present priced to perfection either way.

Medtech's Headwinds Are Geopolitical Now

The softer spot was medical technology. Medtech sales rose 2.5% to $8.6 billion, but were roughly flat outside the United States, and the reasons finance chief Joe Wolk gave Reuters were strikingly global: the Middle East conflict, European austerity and pricing pressure in China weighed more heavily on international device sales, with health budgets in the Gulf being redirected toward defense spending. Add slower sales of the Abiomed unit's Impella heart pumps after a study in the United Kingdom, and you have a devices business fighting on several fronts at once — none of them of its own making.

Wolk also told the Wall Street Journal, in comments Reuters relayed, that the company is leaning toward spinning out its orthopedics business — the hips-and-knees unit — a move that would continue J&J's long reshaping into a pharma-and-medtech company with fewer moving parts. Put the two reports together and Tuesday's healthcare story writes itself: the insurer that spent two years as the industry's problem child is raising forecasts, and the diversified giant that never has a bad quarter is quietly redrawing its own map. Earnings season is young — Previously set the stage in this morning's overnight markets wrap — but healthcare just gave it its most interesting morning yet. More coverage is on the Previously news front through the day.