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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%

#41

Post by segfaltnh »

brightball wrote: post #26
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…

Does anybody defend them? I’ve been on the selection side as an employer and several others will probably echo what I’m about to say. Virtually every insurance provider is going up 15-20% / year to the point that it’s completely unsustainable. United was quoted to me as almost 20% lower than current rate for our provider (before they are about to go up 20%). On premium alone they will save some people close to $500 /…

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.

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

#42

Post by NickC25 »

daveguy wrote: post #23
acchow wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you respond to people that say the profit motive is what drives innovation, and in the long term we’d rather have better, novel treatments sooner

Profit motives for medical / biotech research, yes. What innovations have insurance companies made in the last 100 years besides to squeeze out more profit?

A lot of that research is primarily done in university labs, mind you. On the taxpayer dime. Somehow the research escapes a lab and Pfizer manages to put some stupid name on it and reaps billions in profit.

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

#43

Post by bastardoperator »

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…

The problem with greed is it has no limits. These people are happily dancing on graves all the way to the bank, and we allow it.

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

#44

Post by AlienRobot »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #37
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 don't particularly care if health insurance is public or private. DIRECT health care labor costs (doctor's, nurses, etc) are ~40-60% of TOTAL healthcare spending. Smart people try to figure out ways to make our system better every day. If there was a silver bullet, we'd have already taken it. Health insurance profits are ~1.2% of total health care spending, the cost of running it is approximately ~4% more. It's alw…

I have good news! If you move it to the public sector, you will effectively pay doctors less money for the same work. That's because the way it works currently is that the doctors have to deal with private insurance bureaucracy. By freeing them from this responsibility, they have more time to take care of patients, which should effectively gets you more medical bang for your buck.

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

#45

Post by walrus01 »

bastardoperator wrote: post #43
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…

The problem with greed is it has no limits. These people are happily dancing on graves all the way to the bank, and we allow it.

"chart goes up and to the right!" seems to excuse just about anything in some peoples' political philosophy.

much shareholder value was increased, I'm sure.

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

#46

Post by slibhb »

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…

Insurance isn't a good industry to "get insanely rich". It doesn't have high profit margins. For one thing, the ACA mandates that insurance companies can't keep profits past a certain point.

My sense is that people expect too much from their health insurance. Subconsciously, we expect to experience no pain and live forever. When this inevitably doesn't happen, we blame insurance companies for not bankrolling infinite healthcare.

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

#47

Post by segfaltnh »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #37
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 don't particularly care if health insurance is public or private. DIRECT health care labor costs (doctor's, nurses, etc) are ~40-60% of TOTAL healthcare spending. Smart people try to figure out ways to make our system better every day. If there was a silver bullet, we'd have already taken it. Health insurance profits are ~1.2% of total health care spending, the cost of running it is approximately ~4% more. It's alw…

Honest question as someone who prefers single payer but acknowledged it's not a silver bullet: how much of the costs are nurses and doctors vs. admin? It seems to me there's a lot of overhead in passing the bills around to get paid. I just had my appendix out last year and got billed 8 times by 8 different firms, each with payment portals, call centers, billing providers, etc. I assume there's a lot of inefficiency internally too.

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

#48

Post by jrflowers »

criddell wrote: post #34
jrflowers wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UnitedHealth is not an insurance company. They own an insurance company as well as OptumRx, a pharmacy benefit manager, which is described at the very top of this article.

Can you explain how discount cards (like GoodRx) work?

No but I understand that Friskies and Lean Cuisine are not the same products despite both being owned by Nestle.

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

#49

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

AlienRobot wrote: post #44
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't particularly care if health insurance is public or private. DIRECT health care labor costs (doctor's, nurses, etc) are ~40-60% of TOTAL healthcare spending. Smart people try to figure out ways to make our system better every day. If there was a silver bullet, we'd have already taken it. Health insurance profits are ~1.2% of total health care spending, the cost of running it is approximately ~4% more. It's alw…

I have good news! If you move it to the public sector, you will effectively pay doctors less money for the same work. That's because the way it works currently is that the doctors have to deal with private insurance bureaucracy. By freeing them from this responsibility, they have more time to take care of patients, which should effectively gets you more medical bang for your buck.

You're describing the federal system being massively more efficient - which is theoretically possible - but rarely happens in practice.
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