#health insurer

[reading-writing-revolution]

You've doubtless seen the outpourings of sarcastic graveyard humor about Thompson's murder. People hate Unitedhealthcare, for good reason, because he personally decided – or approved – countless policies that killed people by cheating them until they died. Nurses and doctors hate Thompson and United. United kills people, for money. During the most acute phase of the pandemic, the company charged the US government $11,000 for each $8 covid test: https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/06/137300-pct-markup/#137300-pct-markup UHC leads the nation in claims denials, with a denial rate of 32% (!!). If you want to understand how the US can spend 20% of its GDP and get the worst health outcomes in the world, just connect the dots between those two facts: the largest health insurer in human history charges the government a 183,300% markup on covid tests and also denies a third of its claims. UHC is a vertically integrated, murdering health profiteer. They bought Optum, the largest pharmacy benefit manager ("A spreadsheet with political power" -Matt Stoller) in the country. Then they starved Optum of IT investment in order to give more money to their shareholders. Then Optum was hacked by ransomware gang and no one could get their prescriptions for weeks. This killed people: https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/malicious-threat-actor-accesses-unitedhealth-groups-monopolistic-data-exchange-harming-patients-and-pharmacists/# The irony is, Optum is terrible even when it's not hacked. The purpose of Optum is to make you pay more for pharmaceuticals. If that's more than you can afford, you die. Optum – that is, UHC – kills people: https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen Optum isn't the only murderous UHC division. Take Navihealth, an algorithm that United uses to kick people out of their hospital beds even if they're so frail, sick or injured they can't stand or walk. Doctors and nurses routinely watch their gravely ill patients get thrown out of their hospitals. Many die. UHC kills them, for money: https://prospect.org/health/2024-08-16-steward-bankruptcy-physicians-private-equity/ The patients murdered by Navihealth are on Medicare Advantage. Medicare is the public health care system the USA extends to old people. Medicare Advantage is a privatized system you can swap your Medicare coverage for, and UHC leads the country in Medicare Advantage, blitzing seniors with deceptive ads that trick them into signing up for UHC Medicare Advantage. Seniors who do this lose access to their doctors and specialists, have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for their medication, and get hit with $400 surprise bills to use the "free" ambulance service: https://prospect.org/health/2024-12-05-manhattan-medicare-murder-mystery/

Pluralistic: Predicting the present (09 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

[auntierayeraye]

[whatevergreen]

The Polk County Sheriff's Office deliberately misled people into believing that Briana Boston had been released without charges. They shouldn't be allowed to get away with it.

[switchkick]

[hot-wire-this-old-car]

[victusinveritas]

[evitcani-writes]

“It seems like almost all of those people don’t have HIV,” said Jennifer Kates, HIV policy director at KFF, a health-research nonprofit. “If they did, that would be substandard care at a pretty severe level,” she said.

Ya’ll. United Health just got accused of $17 billion in medicare fraud.

Basically they made up diagnosis which are improbable or impossible, “forgot” to remove ones which had been cured, and overall allegedly stole billions from taxpayers.

The government pays insurers a base rate for each Medicare Advantage member. The insurers are entitled to extra money when their patients are diagnosed with certain conditions that are costly to treat.

… About 18,000 Medicare Advantage recipients had insurer-driven diagnoses of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, but weren’t receiving treatment for the virus from doctors, between 2018 and 2021, the data showed. Each HIV diagnosis generates about $3,000 a year in added payments to insurers.

… He said internal company data for 2022 showed a treatment rate for patients UnitedHealth diagnosed with HIV of more than triple what the Journal found. He said the pandemic disrupted care, lowering treatment rates during the period analyzed by the Journal, and that the analysis failed to account for patients who started treatments in future years.

The Medicare data, however, show UnitedHealth’s patients with insurer-driven HIV diagnoses were on the antiretrovirals at low rates even before the pandemic, and hardly any started the drugs in the years after UnitedHealth diagnosed them.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/medicare-health-insurance-diagnosis-payments-b4d99a5d

I bet United Health really wishes it was a different week right now.

UPDATE/EDIT: Article is from July. I didn’t notice myself since it came up in my news feed. Don’t always trust the internet to be time accurate. 😎My guess is it is getting promoted due to current events. However, there are some updates concerning actions taken based on the report which you can look into by checking the authors’ other articles.

[blairwaldcrf]

[psychologyrooms]

Most health funds provide access to psychological services. You will be issued with a receipt, which you can use to claim on your private health insurance. We advise you get in contact with your respective health insurer to discuss applicable rebates as this can differ according you your insurer and level of coverage.

[typhlonectes]

[davidaugust]

Scares the Dickens out them. 😳

[nando161mando]

Interesting 🤔

[sajirah]

To put into perspective my feelings on the United Healthcare CEO story, I'm gonna tell you a super fun story.

Around six years ago I was dying of organ failure.

Like, full on organs-shutting-down-couldn't-eat-anything-for-weeks-could-hardly-function organ failure. I had surgery scheduled to help reverse some of this. Hope was on the horizon. I was going to live. I was going to be okay. I just needed to get to my surgery date.

And then the day before that surgery I got a call.

"We've been fighting with your insurance company for weeks," said the lady on phone. "They keep telling us your procedure isn't 'medically necessary'. Dr. [Surgeon] screamed at them for a half an hour yesterday...but they still refuse to cover it."

I was given a choice during that conversation: go ahead with the surgery anyway and be on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars...or don't get the surgery...and almost certainly die.

I'm sure you can guess which one I chose.

I'm sure you can also guess what the name of my insurance company was at the time.

[jay-wasstuff]

-

Bonus: the old man (+insp)

[hot-wire-this-old-car]

i hope they know what an icon they are