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UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

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Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#301

Post by cruffle_duffle »

standardUser wrote: post #293
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't see your point. I don't pretend not to understand this phenomenon, and the need for healthcare reform has always been one of my strongest political beliefs. But that doesn't mean murder is any less bad! Is the implication that this kind of murder can only happen as an expression of widespread popular anger? I definitely don't think that's so. There are plenty of places in the world where corporate execut…

Change the term "the need for healthcare reform" with "the need to stop insurance executives from killing my mother" and you may have an easier time understanding it. It's personal. Make it personal for thousands of people and some of them will inevitably be radicalized.

> Make it personal for thousands of people and some of them will inevitably be radicalized.

I fully understand the motive and can empathize with the alleged assailant but that doesn’t mean I am celebrating the fact somebody got murdered. Being able to empathize and understand the motives doesn’t make what the person who shot that dude morally or ethically right.

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#302

Post by mgraczyk »

maxerickson wrote: post #296
mgraczyk wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant Prednisone is $60/year. I'm not sure that's quite right but it's very cheap, that's roughly my out of pocket cost in the US Just one of the biologics is 500k/year

So you are mischaracterizing the biologics then. They are indicated for UC in the US. It's just that the doctor thought that combined, higher doses would work better (and apparently it did). The prednisone still had him shitting blood 20 times a day. Cheap indeed. How do we even have a conversation if you take drugs that are approved for treating a condition and just hand wave that they are "not tested"? https://www.…

The combination has not been tested in a way that could show efficacy, as far as I can tell

I'm not against experimenting with new drugs, I just don't think we should force insurers to pay since 99% of the time the experiments will not work

We should move toward a pay for performance model but not torch the cost controls while we're at it

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#303

Post by loeg »

gopher_space wrote: post #288
loeg wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP is rounding. It's an approximate centroid of a variety of numbers over time, but pretty consistently in the 70s or 80s.

1) What else in America enjoys an 80% satisfaction rate, broadly speaking? 2) Why didn't this number change after women's healthcare took a massive hit? I'm assuming this is like calculating unemployment rates, where you need to play around with your definitions. Like, services no longer being available can't factor into "satisfaction" in any way. More concretely, if you have two pharmacies in town and one of them cl…

> What else in America enjoys an 80% satisfaction rate, broadly speaking?

https://thehill.com/changing-america/3870943-americans-large...

> Although personal life satisfaction varies based on income, age, marital status and education level, between 81 percent and 90 percent of Americans are satisfied with their own family life, current housing situation, job, education, community and personal health.

> Slightly lower levels — between 71 percent and 77 percent — said the same about the amount of leisure time they have, their household income and standard of living.

So, ya know, lots of things that aren't super politicized.

> Why didn't this number change after women's healthcare took a massive hit?

(1) This question is asking about the quality of healthcare you received, not your perception of healthcare for others. A minority of women are directly impacted through the healthcare system by Dobbs (2022) (as opposed to indirect or non-healthcare effects).

(2) Some of the novel abortion restrictions post-Dobbs happened later? The most recent point on this graph is 2022. So it may just not show up yet until 2023/2024 numbers.

(3) The 2022 satisfaction number is slightly lower than the 2021 number (72% vs 76%). You could plausibly attribute some of that to Dobbs.

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#304

Post by arcbyte »

mrangle wrote: post #263
cyberax wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The gleeful mockery is largely from anonymous accounts. I remember when the same type of thing was attributed to "Russian bots" after the 2016 election. I worked in medical-adjacent areas for a decade. I dated a doctor, and I asked him what people feel in his hospital about that. He said that basically NOBODY has any sympathy for this CEO. The most concern is at the level of "we shouldn't condone murders". And you…

[flagged]

You're in a bubble. Four of my family members are in the medical business plus three friends. Two are doctors. Only one person has expressed sympathy and that was for the family. The rest were exactly as OP described: we don't condone murders, they hope this person is brought to justice, but they don't feel any sympathy. Emphasis on the the emotion there - no disgust, no sadness, no sympathy. Just a logical recognition that they don't condone this.

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#305

Post by breadwinner »

voisin wrote: post #297
breadwinner wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patients must be incentivized to understand their care and question care that is unnecessary and wasteful. The partial solution you mention is the way to go, and if every employer adopted it, it will change the culture, and will at that point become a full solution.

Capitalist structures have a long history of pushing ownership of problems to the powerless individual, then exploiting information asymmetries (and actively obfuscating the truth that would allow for better informed decisions) for profit. Suggesting that the average person should be able to make medical decisions and override their health care provider’s recommendation is ridiculous.

> Suggesting that the average person should be able to make medical decisions and override their health care provider’s recommendation is ridiculous.

The situation is similar to taking your out-of-warranty car to a dealer for repairs. Sometimes, you may suspect they’re not being completely honest with you. What do you do in that case? You get a second opinion before agreeing to a costly repair.

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#306

Post by stogot »

rich_sasha wrote: post #231
quitit wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People will say that this is necessary to remain competitive, but it just isn't. In other countries there are private health funds that return all of their profits to their members by simply covering more types of care and lowering premiums, all while still giving their staff very good, very attractive pay. That is clearly a win:win setting without being a government-run entity. A person doesn't need to earn 100M-20…

Within the US, could you have a cooperative-style insurance scheme that pays any excess to its members? I believe these days most insurance companies farm out most of the risk to reinsurers anyway, so you could do it at a relatively small scale.

I have a family member that recently told me they’re on a US co-op plan. I need to explore this but it sounds like what you describe?

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#307

Post by readthenotes1 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #24
readthenotes1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, before that (and continuing), the largest customer of drugs in the United States is prohibited from negotiating price for most drugs. The exorbitant costs arose with the provision of private medical insurance in the 1940s but only really took off when Medicare and Medicaid came in the 1969s with, essentially, a blank check for cost. Things weren't improved in the 1980s when emergency rooms were required to prov…

> the largest customer of drugs in the United States is prohibited from negotiating price for most drugs Note that this changed in 2022 for the most-bought drugs.

The CMS negotiated for 10 drugs for 2026 fiscal year. Hooray.

https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/medicare-drug-price...

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#308

Post by JumpCrisscross »

wat10000 wrote: post #264
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you spoken to regular people not terminally online? They have no sympathy for the CEO Everyone I have spoken to has no sympathy for him as a CEO but sympathy for him as a human. He is wrong and the healthcare system is broken. But this was also murder. If your sense of empathy is so fucked that you’re pro murder, you need to speak to a professional. (If you’re struggling with this and don’t want to let hate tu…

To paraphrase the Joker: when tens of thousands of people die because their health insurance denies needed care, nobody panics. But kill one little insurance CEO and everyone loses their mind. I’m personally much more interested in why people are so uncaring about a bad system that kills a ton of innocent people, than in why people don’t care about the murder of someone who got wealthy making it happens.

> kill one little insurance CEO and everyone loses their mind

A narrow slice of social media is losing its mind. It’s New York. It’s unusual. But there are a lot of gun deaths in America every month.

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#309

Post by maxerickson »

mgraczyk wrote: post #302
maxerickson wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are mischaracterizing the biologics then. They are indicated for UC in the US. It's just that the doctor thought that combined, higher doses would work better (and apparently it did). The prednisone still had him shitting blood 20 times a day. Cheap indeed. How do we even have a conversation if you take drugs that are approved for treating a condition and just hand wave that they are "not tested"? https://www.…

The combination has not been tested in a way that could show efficacy, as far as I can tell I'm not against experimenting with new drugs, I just don't think we should force insurers to pay since 99% of the time the experiments will not work We should move toward a pay for performance model but not torch the cost controls while we're at it

Why not force society (via insurance premiums) to pay for some testing? It's not like combining drugs with different mechanisms is a stupid experiment.

The gold standard for testing the combination would be to test it against the standard of care, so it's fairly precious to complain that the doctor and patient here don't have a big enough pool.

Re: UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)

#310

Post by readthenotes1 »

Auracle wrote: post #42
readthenotes1 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to let drug companies charge extravagant prices because of otherwise medical care costs would not be so high. Companies providing medical Care have to spend 80% of their costs on actual medical care, not marketing and executive compensation. The only way to make the 20% that really matter to the decision makers larger is to make the medical costs larger. It is one reason people on United healthcare get $100 g…

I believe it’s 85% for group plans. I firmly believe that was a poison pill put in the ACA intended to drive prices up enough where people got so upset we end up with single payer. The alternative is that the people that penned the ACA have absolutely no understanding of economics, and I’m not sure which is worse. The sad thing is for medications all it would take would be a simple bill that says that medications in…

~50% of people in the USA are on government supplied medical insurance, up from ~33% in 2016 (when I first looked).

That percentage will grow for the next few years as boomers migrate to Medicare

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