It’s that time of year again. We’ve released 2021’s Fortune 500 list, our annual ranking of public U.S. companies ranked by their revenues over the past fiscal year. And guess what? During a global pandemic, the health care industry made a big splash.
Where to begin? CVS Health, now completely consolidated with insurer Aetna, took the number four spot. It’s followed immediately by UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest private insurer. And then drug distributors McKesson and AmerisourceBergen make up numbers seven and eight in the rankings. That’s four legacy health care firms in the top 10 alone and other firms such as Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon in that top tier are at least attempting to become more medicine-focused themselves (with varying degrees of success).
All told, six of the top 20 and 10 of the top 50 companies on this year’s Fortune 500 are health care firms, and they run the gamut from pharmacies to drug distributors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies.
