On August 1, 2026, the University of Miami Health System and UnitedHealthcare announced they had reached a new multi-year agreement. The headline was good news: UHealth’s hospitals, facilities, and physicians would remain in network for hundreds of thousands of South Florida patients covered by UHC commercial plans, ACA marketplace plans, and Medicaid.
The announcement came after months of escalating tension, missed deadlines, and genuine uncertainty about whether one of South Florida’s largest academic medical centers would be reachable for UHC members.
For most of those members, the deal resolved the crisis. But buried inside the same announcement was a sentence that did not resolve anything for a specific group of patients — the seniors enrolled in UnitedHealthcare’s Preferred Care Network Medicare Advantage plan…