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UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

fortune.com

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Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#141

Post by jampekka »

gedpeck wrote: post #116
tptacek wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I'll defend them, conceptually at least. I think most actors in this system are in some sense corrupt, and I don't think insurers are the most corrupt. Pull up the 2022 National Health Expenditure table, "National Health Expenditures by Type of Expenditure and Program: Calendar Year 2022" and look at combined hospital and physician expenses compared to insurer expenses; it's pretty black-and-white.

One should not profit from denying care. All health systems ration care. Doing so in a way that people profit from denying care is immoral.

And inefficient to boot!

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#142

Post by lotsofpulp »

cibyr wrote: post #111
segfaltnh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel people defend them by opposing any other approach to solving this. Politicians in particular say things like "preserving customer choice", which I think just means having the ability to select among all the terrible insurance companies who will treat you poorly.

Most people don't even get the ability to select among all the terrible insurance companies - their employer chooses for them!

Technically, they have the ability to choose whoever they want, they just have to pay full price with post tax income. If people accept their employer's choice, then they get to pay for a lower, employer subsidized premium with pre tax income.

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#143

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

landryraccoon wrote: post #28
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #4

https://archive.ph/cg4we I do not like UnitedHealth, I do not like our existing crop of health insurance executives, and I might even be viscerally glad at some level that the UnitedHealth CEO was killed in a world where justice clearly takes a back seat to greed, but I wish the headline didn't say "overcharged", because there's no established amount of markup that is the correct amount of markup other than what peop…

I take issue with the claim that in order to say something is too expensive that you must be able to precisely propose an alternative price. I have no idea what the correct margin for essential cancer drugs is. I don’t think it should be a 10x markup. Intuitively, it seems that there’s something wrong with price gouging dying cancer patients. If you have an argument why my intuition is wrong, please share it.

> I have no idea what the correct margin for essential cancer drugs is.

So let's talk about it and think about it and form an idea. There's no universally right or wrong answer, but you should at least be able to decide what answer is right to you.

> I don’t think it should be a 10x markup.

What about 1x markup?

> Intuitively, it seems that there’s something wrong with price gouging

There is, but you're relying on the word "gouging", and without identifying what price you think is gouging vs reasonable profit, stopping at the point where you express that "too much is too much" doesn't get us any closer to having actionable goals.

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#144

Post by ceejayoz »

nozzlegear wrote: post #88
jsheard wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if that's true for the actual pharmas, how are insurance companies like UHC innovating? They're just middlemen.

I'm not sure about UHC specifically, but insurance companies do innovate. Some insurers have invested pretty heavily in biotech and wearables, and they're also a big driver behind telehealth/remote health monitoring tech. We can cynically say that they're just in it because they want to reduce costs – and that's probably true – but it'd be simplistic to say investing to reduce costs is purely selfish.

> they're also a big driver behind telehealth/remote health monitoring tech

Until COVID, insurers in my area wouldn't cover telehealth at all. They opposed it tooth and nail.

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#145

Post by bloppe »

porcoda wrote: post #7

Nothing is shocking about the insurance industry anymore since they’ve been pulling this kind of thing for years. To me the most shocking thing is the people who defend them. I understand the drive to make money and build huge businesses: what confuses me is that we treat human health the same as things that don’t directly impact the health of people. It seems to me that there are endless opportunities to get insanel…

I'm going to go ahead and defend them because private insurance is actually far from the most broken thing about US healthcare, yet they seem to shoulder all the blame.

Average health insurance profit margin in US is ~3%. That's not a greedy profit margin. It's the health care that's expensive, not the insurance. Health care is much more expensive in the US than in similar countries. I'm not an expert on why, but there are all sorts of misaligned incentives on IP and drug pricing that need to be fixed. It's not the insurers.

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#146

Post by antisthenes »

jklinger410 wrote: post #30

A storm is brewing and its heading right at the insurance industry.

Is the storm going to be just as impotent and worthless as the ACA was?

Ultimately ACA resulted in high-deductible plans and the current situation, despite temporarily insuring a higher percentage of the population.

The next solution needs to account for these factors. Will it?

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#147

Post by mattgreenrocks »

throwway120385 wrote: post #51
xp84 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally, you have a pretty good point here, since the system we have has two halves that are fundamentally at odds: One part "free market -- maximize your profits as much as you can and get rewarded by a skyrocketing share price!" And one part, unspoken except in the PR BS put out by the insurance companies, "Try to improve the health of patients and have them not die!" The only way the two can coexist at all i…

It ceased to be a free market when we enshrined employer-provided plans into the law. If it were more like auto insurance where I can fire my insurance company and receive a pro-rated refund or renegotiate coverage in the middle of the year then it would be more free. But my employer negotiates for me on my behalf, and their needs are often at odds with my needs. And the whole "open enrollment" period thing creates a…

I never understood why health care had to be so tightly coupled to employment. All it does is tie people down, obfuscate costs, and give insurance companies more leverage over everyone, companies and employees alike.

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#148

Post by jandrese »

bloppe wrote: post #145
porcoda wrote: post #7

Nothing is shocking about the insurance industry anymore since they’ve been pulling this kind of thing for years. To me the most shocking thing is the people who defend them. I understand the drive to make money and build huge businesses: what confuses me is that we treat human health the same as things that don’t directly impact the health of people. It seems to me that there are endless opportunities to get insanel…

I'm going to go ahead and defend them because private insurance is actually far from the most broken thing about US healthcare, yet they seem to shoulder all the blame. Average health insurance profit margin in US is ~3%. That's not a greedy profit margin. It's the health care that's expensive, not the insurance. Health care is much more expensive in the US than in similar countries. I'm not an expert on why, but the…

The army of middlemen the doctors and hospitals need to hire to deal with the insurance companies adds a lot to healthcare costs in the US. Not to mention the armies of middlemen hired by the insurance companies themselves.

While every healthcare system has administrators, the US system with its thousands of different systems interacting with thousands of other individuals makes for a nightmarishly complex problem. Doctors in countries with socialized medicine complain about the government administrators too, but at least they only have one system to deal with.

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#149

Post by NegativeLatency »

jiggawatts wrote: post #136
cluckindan wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And which countries would those be?

Australia, New Zealand, etc…

Admittedly not a ground war, but that's not entirely true:

> In total, there were 97 air attacks on northern Australia, though air reconnaissance was carried out over the region by Axis Powers through much of 1944.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_air_raids_on_Australi...

and

> German and Japanese surface raiders and submarines operated in New Zealand waters on several occasions in 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943 and 1945, sinking a total of four ships while Japanese reconnaissance aircraft flew over Auckland and Wellington preparing for a projected Japanese invasion of New Zealand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_New_Zealan...

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#150

Post by tptacek »

gedpeck wrote: post #116
tptacek wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I'll defend them, conceptually at least. I think most actors in this system are in some sense corrupt, and I don't think insurers are the most corrupt. Pull up the 2022 National Health Expenditure table, "National Health Expenditures by Type of Expenditure and Program: Calendar Year 2022" and look at combined hospital and physician expenses compared to insurer expenses; it's pretty black-and-white.

One should not profit from denying care. All health systems ration care. Doing so in a way that people profit from denying care is immoral.

If you believe that, you should have a bigger problem with what providers bill, because that's the ultimate origin of the constraints.
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