Summary
UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty criticized public outrage over the health insurance industry following the assassination of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson.
In a leaked video to staff, Witty dismissed criticism as “misinformation” and urged employees not to engage with media.
Thompson’s murder outside a Manhattan hotel has intensified scrutiny of the industry’s practices, with bullet casings found at the scene bearing phrases linked to insurance claim denial tactics.
The killing has sparked debate on UnitedHealthcare’s history of denying claims, while the shooter remains at large.
Witty faces unrelated DOJ insider trading allegations.
This is super tone deaf. If I were an executive, I’d be pretending I don’t exist.
Ikr, people in this position are expected to be malicious, they’re also generally expected to be the smart kind of sociopath.
This guy clearly has no idea of the situation he finds himself in
Has anyone checked on him? He sounds suicidal.
Yeah like he might jump out a window or something
Onto some bullet casings labeled:
- cloistered
- clueless
- cunt
Is the situation “being next”?
Yeah I expected people like Jim to be hiding in a cave in the middle of nowhere like Bin Laden right about now
That would require a modicum of self awareness.
The fact that this is an internal video means at least one of your employees don’t think you’ve learned the lesson you need to learn from this mr witty.
Removed by mod
We can protect him from unnecessary care
Witty, clearly reading from a script and dressed casually, defended his industry against accusations it refuses people vital coverage saying “we guard against the pressures that exist for unsafe care or unnecessary care.”
Doubling down on your lie ain’t gonna help you.
Unnecessary care
The doctor thinks its necessary. Claims handler and insurance company suddenly become medical professionals and give a second opinion of “its not necessary”.
Why even bother with the doctor? Just ask the insurance company instead.
Whats funny too - whenever the alternative is brought up (socialised healthcare), at least the conservative side of america starts seething over it, falling over themselves defending private insurance companies
Why even bother with the doctor? Just ask the insurance company instead.
100% this. If they know what’s best for us they should open a hospital.
Do the people making these refusals have medical degrees? Those people without medical degrees actually think they know better than a doctor?
“Necessary” is a really telling word there. Is it necessary that I have pain meds? No. It’s possible to go through my life in pain. It would fucking suck, but those pain meds aren’t strictly necessary. Just fuck anybody and any corporation who would want you to go through life in pain.
Same with teeth.
Sure, I can live without them but everything becomes harder and worse and there’s an awful period where you could probably die from the infections as many people used to.
But those are luxury bones covered by other, separate insurance, as though it is not related to my health.
100%. The majority of my health concerns at the moment are my teeth, and because dental is separate, I’m spending a lot more out of pocket because the maximum coverage is so much lower.
It’s also a fucking rip off. I supposedly have “good” insurance options and the premiums for a family of 3 are almost $1k a year, only cover up to $2k yearly of work, and requires 40 - 65% coinsurance depending on the type of work.
So if I spend less than $2k on dental work, I lose money buying dental. The max benefit I get is from $4k of dental, and any work beyond that just makes the situation even less attractive.
Every dental plan I’ve ever had (and they are considered good) was just my money pretax. No actual insurance. So, use it or lose it. I’ve already paid for it.
And eyes. If eyes aren’t necessary they should prove it by gouging out their own.
Dentist stuff being covered separately is more due to a historical division between MDs and dds that is unrelated to profit motive per se.
I mean those do exist, see Kaiser Permanente. Even they have a much lower denial rate than United.
I know! Kaiser is my favorite, but they have a very limited coverage area and a few years ago I moved outside of it.
Isn’t that a closed ecosystem though?
It is, though rarely they’ll reimburse you for out of network stuff as well. I got a COVID vaccine from rite aid and because Kaiser wasn’t fully stocking it at the time they reimbursed me.
They also only provide coverage in certain regions, so if you’re completely out of their regions and network they reimburse there too. They do this through a “travel card”.
Part of it might be trying to guard against upselling.
We had two kids. One at a corporate hospital that specializes in pre- and post-natal care, and another at a non-profit independent hospital.
In retrospect, the first kid felt an awful lot like buying a car. Or getting married. Literally felt like they were trying to tack on all the things. “Oh you need to take first aid and CPR classes, they are covered by your insurance if you’re pregnant”. “Oh you should take this breastfeeding class”. “Have you seen our Alternative Birthing Center?”. “Babies looking a little big. Let’s schedule extra ultrasounds to track it”. Followed by scaring us into a planned c-section.
Kids first night he’s got a little wheeze. Head nurse during the day knew her shit, she said it was fine and noted it in the chart. Night nurse ain’t having that. Sent him right down to the NICU. Spent the night. Nothing wrong with him, he just didn’t really cry a lot so he never got to get all the fluid out of his lungs.
And then the bottle shaming after the fact. La leche League, et al…all a bunch of titnazis. But lactation counseling is covered by insurance. So…
Second kid, hospital looked and felt a lot more rundown, but the kid was even bigger, and they were less concerned about his size and even encouraged my wife when she said she wanted a VBAC. Staff was way more personal. Totally different experience.
I partway expect to start getting calls about my first kids extended warranty soon.
My sleep doctor has talked about going to appeal hearings for medicine with insurance companies, and talked about how they brought doctors, but not sleep doctors. So, when the arbitrator or whatever asked a question about sleep practices or medicine to the insurance doctor, they would defer the question to her because they didn’t know the answer.
But Obama and FEMA are running the death panels.
Just being Devil’s Advocate here: Medicare fraud is a thing - docs who prescribe, or claim to have performed, unnecessary treatments, which may be as much as $60B (out of $900B spending, so…7-ish%). Maybe not enough to justify UHC’s 32% denial rate. And nobody seems to source their $60B or $100B fraud estimates - I can only find case evidence for a few hundred million, and those are cases spanning years.
That’s not a reason to deny claims for cancer treatment. If fraud is their worry, have a fraud team to investigate, don’t cut off coverage when your life saving operation runs an hour past the allotted time.
Sounds like it would be easier to have a single government entity focused on fraud and Healthcare outcomes though.
The main arguement for private health insurance is that it will help better optimize how healthcare is distributed, but in a capatilistic society it seems unlikely we’d get anything other than means based optimization. However, Healthcare shouldn’t be optimized for financial status, but most likely should be optimized for optimal coverage.
unnecessary care
Unnecessary for the company bottom line, yeah
It’s not enough that these people steal from us and kill us, but they also insist we not criticize them while they do it.
They don’t see as anything more than a resource, a resource that complains when it is harvested is an annoyance.
What do you think they will do when the military is fully automated? Become nice?
That’s why it’s time we shat back.
Lol just the mental image I now have of some angry person bent over and aiming their ass skyward while saying, “It’s time the shit rolled uphill.”
It’s beautiful Clark.
I was there when the magic was written.
Plz explain the deep magic!
Also, sorry about your table.
if you don’t like the reflection, don’t blame the mirror.
Oh I like this one.
“There are very few people in the history of the US healthcare industry who had a bigger positive effect on American healthcare than Brian [Thompson].”
Lol you fucking shitting me? This guy’s whole speech is a lie.
Not so much a lie as speaking from a very twisted point of view. From his perspective, making more money is the only kind of positive change. As the CEO who oversaw the highest denial rate in the industry, Thompson’s leadership would of course be seen as positive by his fellow executives.
Not really, if you don’t view doctors, nurses, technicians, researchers, or any of the other people as “the industry”
The industry seems to be limited to health insurance, and not healthcare.
Yeah, I was referring to the health insurance industry, which I do not consider at all a part of the healthcare industry. Aside from that, I’m not sure how any of the good folks laboring away helping others stay healthy are related to the denial rates or business executives I was talking about.
100%
In a way it’s true. In death, he’s having a hand in changing the public perception of privatized healthcare in the US, and perhaps will help spark change altogether.
we guard against the pressures that exist for unsafe care or unnecessary care.
If he is going to be that far up his own ass, I hope he is at least checking for polyps.
They’d want people to learn self-colonoscopies so they can save on the 50 and over crowd.
If a handful of people are celebrating this and the rest are condemning that behaviour then sure I might listen to this dude.
If more than 95% of the comments I’ve seen across all platforms and political leaning, then I’m afraid that society has spoken and they’ve had enough of these parasites.
Do think we will have change? No, not unless we get more people willing to do things like that hero in NYC did the other morning.
I attended many C level meetings in a publicly traded company, grateful to be out by being fired after throwing the CTO off a cliff for sexual harrassment. Yeah, those whistleblower protection documents that I had to sign were used to wipe asses.
I can guarantee you that right now many meeting are having had where people need to come up with ideas to make the company look better without doing anything that would make them less money. They’ll come up with strategies where they promise to do better, probably implement a few rules that actually make it better for 6 months or so, then they’ll change it to make it worse than it is today. Potential disasters are always seen as opportunities to make even more money.
Fuck these people.
I’m now a CTO myself at a private company and we do better. We pay honest wages, also for C level (as in, I don’t have an insane salary or disturbing benefits), we try not to over hire, we try not to fire. I’m the first in, the last out every day. We focus NOT on lying to customers but on actually making good products, that is why people love working with us. There are companies that are working hard to do it right.
Y’all hiring?
This is the way.
Take away the corporate welfare and regulatory cover and let the big evil companies fail. Maybe another big, evil company will take its place but without government cover it will fail too. Eventually small, less evil companies will take their place.
Honestly, I would gradually increase taxes the bigger a company becomes (financially speaking), until at some point its unsustainable to grow any further. This way companies will grow to whatever max size we want them to be, big enough to matter, small enough to not matter too much for the public good
For a non-American, his “industry” is one of the few deterrents to those considering moving to the United States (with guns and MAGA cultists)
I wish I had an in somewhere else in the developed world.
Add our sociopathic work culture to the list.
As someone who worked with a lot of Americans, I came to believe that some of the sociopathic work culture was due, in part at least, to the tying of medical coverage to work itself.
I saw so many peers at the stage of burnout, having to jump from one job to another without so much as a break, because their healthcare and their family’s healthcare depended on it.
It struck me that in many cases many Americans were, at least in some sense, enslaved.
If I stop working and I break my leg playing out in the snow - there’s no risk to my financial future and so I can, if needed, rest (either to recover from said injury or to recover from the mental anguish of burnout or other.)
Many of my peers did not have that luxury.
I think that it goes a lot deeper than that. In the 90s I worked on a joint base shared with Americans and made a lot of American friends. They were shocked and sarcastic about the benefits that we had (Australians) that they did not have. Things such as long service leave (12 weeks paid leave after 10 years service) and even our four weeks annual leave. The shocked but I can understand, but the sarcasm I don’t get? It was as if our refusal to expend ourselves to the grind diminished us as a culture ?
That was 35 years ago, and our conditions have degraded accordingly. But I remember the American sentiment of the times well.
I’ve heard that sarcasm all my life, it’s intertwined in our culture, that if you’re not working above and beyond then you’re lazy and deserve to be poor. That’s how I found myself in my 20s working 84 hour weeks as the norm, and while doing better than average, I’d no longer recommend the lifestyle.
It’s definitely true, and it’s by design.
I’m for one hoping they never catch The Adjuster.
ahaha that’s great
There he goes again, issuing yet more denials, and denying new claims and whatnot. Thats what got them here in the first place, christ. Have they learned nothing, this is very unwitty of “Mr. Witty”
Also, can we very much continue and expand with prefacing the pos’ name with the pre-nomial “$millions” they are compensated to spout their bullshit? Reminds me of congressmen being required to wear decals of their sponsors like racecars or something
In times of uncertainty, it’s easy to fall back to things you are familiar with
Is the OTHER CEO of your company not an indication that you should probably stop your bitching?
Get the bankers out of my doctor’s office, the only people who should have the authority to decide what care is necessary is the physician treating me and myself when signing informed consent forums.
Never forget that when a business owner tells you that they put consumers first, nothing is stopping them from converting their business into either a cooperative or a nonprofit organization dedicated to the public benefit. Even if it’s the case that at some given moment, the business really is putting consumers first, there is no benefit to the consumer for the business to continue operating as a privately owned for-profit institution. The only benefit a for-profit institution provides that a cooperative or nonprofit cannot, is the power for leadership to prioritize their own interests above all other stakeholders whenever it suits them.
Non-profits also pay a lot less to their workers. I worked for one, for a while. Then I had to quit because I have bills to pay.
A lot of nonprofit organizations will try to justify underpaying workers on the basis of social interest. However, it certainly is not some kind of requirement and many do offer compensation which is competitive with what the private sector offers. And furthermore, if more firms in the market were structured in a cooperative or nonprofit manner such that this became the expectation instead of the exception, these firms would not easily be able to get away with underpaying workers because they’re not actually doing something special anymore.
By the way, none of this is to say that this would magically solve all of our problems or anything like that. It’s only that there will be a lot fewer problems to worry about when most businesses are legally obligated to prioritize the interests of consumers and workers above arbitrary shareholders
Well that all sounds nice. But it sucked for me.
Dear asshole, we hate everything about your industry. Signed, fucking everyone except a few other rich assholes.
This topic is bringing the left and the right together. This affects all of us! Medicare for all is the way!
My Trump voting parents and sister agree. Democrats for some reason weren’t even talking about it in the election season, almost like their silence had been purchased by big medicine. Maybe this needs to be a national grassroots movement that rolls straight over our elected idiots.
State level electoral reform will break the two party system and usher in the non violent revolution jfk talked about so many years ago.
