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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)

#341

Post by wat10000 »

vacuity wrote: post #317
wat10000 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a huge difference between the inevitable random crazies driven to madness because they can’t handle their unfortunate but unavoidable circumstances, and abusing the entire population on such a scale that when someone murders an executive in broad daylight, the prevailing public mood is “serves him right.”

If (according to some) a woman wearing revealing clothes deserves to be raped, and (to most, hopefully) a drunk driver deserves imprisonment and paying any victims, what does someone who has knowingly and intentionally participated in a scheme leading to the deaths of thousands and suffering of millions for personal profit deserve? I myself don't agree to the death penalty or any killing if it doesn't serve to thwart…

Pointless question. If you do nothing at all for long enough, then people will eventually decide that the system isn’t getting it done and will start taking matters into their own hands. You can’t choose between doing nothing and violence. Doing nothing begets violence.

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

#342

Post by slt2021 »

plagiarist wrote: post #340
slt2021 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not true, Insurance Pharmacies Doctors and Hospitals all work together. The high list prices you see are only exist there to scare uninsured/underinsured Americans and to force them to buy/pay more expensive insurance. As soon as you get treated, these list prices magically get reduced on the backend by factor of 2-3x. Doctors themselves cannot price gouge patients, but they can price gouge via middleman (insurance).…

> Also insurance literally FORCES americans to work, because thats the only way to get affordable health insurance. This is really important. This system is artificially lowering the cost of labor and preventing people from immediately leaving workplaces where they are treated poorly by the employers or the customers.

People sometimes ask why there are fewer independent artists or writers, or small artisans like in Europe.

The reason is if you want to live, you need to get healthcare, and for that you need to be employed by BigCorp (because marketplace insurance is overpriced and crappy thanks to OBAMA).

The system is set up in a way to keep extracting and exploiting people in their prime years of age

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

#343

Post by computerthings »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #83
griomnib wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve spent days reviewing comments on Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, news articles, et al and I’ve never seen such a uniformity of opinion on anything in my life.

Comments you see on the Internet are not a random sample! If there's one lesson I could drive home to everyone about media literacy, this is it. Everything you see online is intensely, competitively selected for its ability to drive engagement, and celebrating murder drives a ton of engagement precisely because it transgresses well-established and widely agreed norms. Indeed, as we've seen here, the murder drives so…

He ran the health insurance company that holds the record in denied claims in the US. I think that's why hardly anyone sheds a tear. Right now, the culturally transgressive thing to do is, say, make youtube videos about how shocking it is for the public to have no love for this CEO, and then getting ratio'd, everywhere, all the time.

What do find troubling is the glorification of the killer. We know nothing about his motives, might be a paid hit, whatever. But I attribute part of that to being basically drunk on the fact that people really enjoy that this CEO -- as a faceless representative of a whole class of people -- got killed. And they genuinely do enjoy he did, not necessarily for noble reasons, but it's not "really about something else".

The problem boils down to the abuser reacting in shock at backlash, instead of realizing they've abused people into genuinely hating them this much.

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

#344

Post by lesuorac »

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.

IIUC, UHC has a margin of 5.8% [1] with a denial rate of 32% [2]. I don't think you can offer insurance at the price that they do while having an honest denial rate.

You may argue that you shouldn't offer insurance for a rate that doesn't cover actual incidence and I would agree but it seems to be their business model.

[1]: https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/content/dam/UHG/PDF/invest...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42359122

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

#345

Post by pixelatedindex »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #146
pixelatedindex wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. A quote comes to mind - “I do not wish death upon another human, but I have read some obituaries with great delight”. This is one of those instances. I have more sympathy for his family than him - he did not have to choose this line of work. Do people have sympathy for Bin Laden or other terr…

> whole thing is a double standard on multiple levels Not really. The double standard is in excusing murder as a political tactic because you don’t like the victim. In this case, the Twitterati will hold their court. And then a real court with real people on the jury will convict. There may also be an inquiry into UnitedHealth, but it will be able to be bludgeoned into partisan death by the law and order bloc. > only…

Agree to disagree I guess. The double standard in my eyes is that because an elite was murdered there’s an outcry for justice from the wealthy. When the police shoots someone or when there is a school shooting it’s just “thoughts and prayers” or “they were probably a criminal anyway”.

I do see both sides but the opposite of what you mention though - the ones that sympathize with the CEO are wealthy people who believe almost any method to make money is legitimate, or support the existing healthcare system because it hasn’t screwed them yet. If you think the healthcare system is messed up then you tend to support the killer.

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

#346

Post by toastercat »

breadwinner wrote: post #305
voisin wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm willing to take a risk there because if my car craps out, I'll buy another.

Wish I can say the same about health. If the doctor who has my entire medical history recommends x procedure, yes I'm not going to risk potentially having irreversible damage to my body.

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

#347

Post by willis936 »

samatman wrote: post #285
willis936 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>no realistic chance of happening twice This is where you lose me. If you have a hung jury that means you have at least an 11/12 chance of it happening again.

It's not going to happen once either.

What makes you so confident that 12/12 people would agree to convict this assassin? All signs indicate otherwise to me.

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

#348

Post by aethros »

gruez wrote: post #241
lenerdenator wrote: post #70

The events of the last week are just what happens when a company decides to refuse to meet its customers in the marketplace of sane ideas. You could probably have gotten away with what UNH did if the money wasn't so ridiculous. Thompson himself had a compensation package worth $10.2 million[0] a year. It's reasonable to think that other c-suiters at the company, along with those of its parent organization, made simil…

>The company also has a 1.53% dividend yield[1]. I don't get it, is the implication that it's too high? Too low? >If you're paying a significant chunk of your yearly earnings to be covered by UNH, you expect the money you paid to go towards providing you with service. Instead, tens of millions of it goes towards a handful of individuals UNH took in 371.6 billion in revenue and made 23.14 billion in profit last year.…

I'd bet if you deduct C-suite salaries that profit becomes a heck of a lot larger. C-suite execs and wall street raid companies for profit all while screwing the average American. This is not news--look at stock buybacks.

If these companies paid less grossly-imbalanced compensation packages to their C-suite vs. the average employee salary, and they operated like an actual company vs. a rich person's piggy bank, I'd be sure willing to bet that profit margin would be a heck of a lot higher. They'd probably be more efficient and provide better service, too.

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

#349

Post by gruez »

aethros wrote: post #348
gruez wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The company also has a 1.53% dividend yield[1]. I don't get it, is the implication that it's too high? Too low? >If you're paying a significant chunk of your yearly earnings to be covered by UNH, you expect the money you paid to go towards providing you with service. Instead, tens of millions of it goes towards a handful of individuals UNH took in 371.6 billion in revenue and made 23.14 billion in profit last year.…

I'd bet if you deduct C-suite salaries that profit becomes a heck of a lot larger. C-suite execs and wall street raid companies for profit all while screwing the average American. This is not news--look at stock buybacks. If these companies paid less grossly-imbalanced compensation packages to their C-suite vs. the average employee salary, and they operated like an actual company vs. a rich person's piggy bank, I'd b…

>I'd bet if you deduct C-suite salaries that profit becomes a heck of a lot larger.

Instead of posting random conjectures with zero backing evidence, you could you know, actually do the research, because "burden of proof" and all. Anyways someone made a similar claim a few days ago, but about HP, and I debunked it with a 30 second search[1]. Unless there's reason to think that HP or united health are outliers in terms of corporate governance, I doubt the ratio between them will vary significantly.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42342189

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

#350

Post by alp1n3_eth »

mgraczyk wrote: post #161

This guy's condition is tragic, but it's crazy to me that people can read this and come away thinking the insurance companies are the bad guys. Many drugs don't work, they are expensive. If there are no voices in the room saying "we will not pay for expensive drugs that do not work", then healthcare costs will continue spiraling out of control. Single payer healthcare will "solve" this by ensuring that the medication…

That's called prescribing off-label, and a lot of moderate to severe IBD patients essentially require it because the recommended dosages (FDA approved) aren't high enough to impact the more severe cases of things like Crohns disease. This decision should be between the doctor and the patient.

The Mayo Clinic runs different trials all the time that involve multiple biologics being used at the same time, AKA "off-label" and they can have great results for the individual. Rinvoq + Skyrizi is a newer combo, but it can be any number of them as different patient's disease can affect them more severely through different pathways.

If a medication combo is approved by a doctor for a patient, and they've even done the worthless dance that is required to try the drugs they already know aren't going to work, then the patient should be allowed it off-label. Especially so if it's proven to be working (lower c-reactive & calpro levels). Tapering off of prednisone in this situation is a massive success. You literally do not know if a biologic will work for a specific case of IBD until it is tried as each patient is different, at the same time these drugs all passed FDA approval and show stats of 40%+ remission after 12-18 weeks.

Also, medication like prednisone can't be prescribed long-term, massive health issues will follow like diabetes and bone density issues (among others highlighted by the article).

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