Health Insurance Companies Take Down Leadership Pages Following Murder of UH CEO
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Even if this person is apprehended (which seems extraordinarily unlikely) an NYC jury isn't going to find him guilty when nullification is an option.
Surely not all that blood is on the hands of the CEO, or even UHC. But everyone has either been denied claims or knows someone that has, through some of the most disgusting treatment witnessable from corporate america. It'd be one thing if you were denied a claim for.... any variety of reasons that follow from the inherent difficulty of managing health insurance as many countries can attest to. But overriding doctor concerns to withhold funding for necessary treatment and withholding as much as possible while raking in profits leaves people with very bitter tastes in their mouths.
Mine included: I'm paying for a medical procedure for a friend next week because her insurance won't cover anesthesia and she can't afford the out of pocket. I had multiple relatives die much sooner than they had to because they were denied funding for critical medication. I've had multiple friends talk about "rationing insulin" (thankfully, both times referring to the past). And naturally healthcare interests—UHC included—lobby both parties heavily, so there's a lot of incentive to continue ignoring the elephant in the room.
This is the system Americans have chosen. Im not saying its the best or shouldnt be improved.
Im for a public option, but there will still be rationing and denial of care. people will still die.
Said more accurately: this is the system chosen for Americans, against many of their wishes, by the officials some of them elected.
"People will still die" is the kind of thing narcissists and sociopaths tell themselves when they are pretty sure that the set of "people" does not include themselves.
It would be nice if they did that consistently and fairly, but they don’t.
Using an AI to review and deny claims with a (claimed) 90% error rate or denying claims without reading them is not vetting, it’s straight up negligence and fraud.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/ai-with-90-error-rate...
https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health...
Some (few) of them. In EU it is different.
The majority of American voters have chosen this system multiple times, and have voted for a president who has explicitly said he'll make this system worse by repealing the ACA. He almost did it the first time, too, and it only failed by one vote.
Maybe this UHC CEO event will get more people talking about healthcare, and ultimately get more people voting for candidates who want to improve the system next time around. I support a public option, so I hope it does. But I won't hold my breath.
No, he has literally said he would replace it with something better.
This is a lie, obviously.
But you can't then assume the people who voted for him were voting for the system to be worse.
Some fraction of them are likely desperately hoping it gets better and have just had their desperation taken advantage of.
> But you can't then assume the people who voted for him were voting for the system to be worse.
At least in 2016, some of his voters that I knew personally just wanted the ACA to be gone and to have "freeloaders" kicked off of the system. They weren't voting to make it worse for themselves, per se, but voted vindictively to make it worse for others.
So tired of the dumbest people having the loudest voices online because populist bumper stickers work better than actual thoughtful commentary.
There's a 100% chance that NYPD have family that have been put to death by UHC. You simply do not appreciate the gravity of contempt for insurance companies and how little anyone cares about the death of their executives. If that startles you, perhaps some serious introspection is in order.
NYPD can simply loose evidence. Or, have it stolen or destroyed in a myriad of "accidents" as is often the case in politically sensitive cases. Just because this case isn't politically sensitive doesn't mean NYPD isn't familiar with these practices. Remember, NYPD gets away with these things when both the public and people with power are watching. What makes you believe critical evidence won't just disappear in this situation?
But even if I am wrong and this hero or champion is arrested and put on trial. What makes you believe an extremely progressive NYC jury will do anything other than nullify the charges?
The only crime here is:
- security cam was not 4K
- security cam did not have audio of the CEO's screams of agony
Even burning buildings down and rioting, while people don't like it, it forces change.
Note how they are spending so much effort to prevent copy-cats like somehow they know there is a reason for many people to be mad and that the evil practices among businesses have been going on too long unchecked. If they treated people fairly and honestly there would be nothing to worry about.
In fact, I would probably throw a party because that's what should happen in such unbelievably lucky and joyous circumstances.
Notice that word in my previous paragraph: Medicare. One of the promises of single‐payer healthcare like Medicare is to lower bloated procedure costs by having a powerful, unified negotiator (the government) on the side of the patient. The fact that Medicare charges anesthesia this way seems to be an intentional example of this.
Is cutting costs here justified? Obviously it would be unjustified if the anesthesia were necessary. On the other hand, it would be justified if the anesthesia charges didn’t actually reflect the cost of the procedure. Personally, I don’t assume Medicare is in the business of maliciously cutting necessary healthcare to lower costs (the “death panels” argument famously put forth by Sarah Palin), at least not without evidence. So what does the evidence show? Well, it’s easy to find stats saying recorded anesthesia procedure times are considered unreliable, that an unusual number of procedure times are measured in round numbers, that the unusual procedure times are consistently and significantly longer than average procedure times, and suggesting (though not proving) fraud on the part of anesthesiologists and doctors.
• https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6324364/
The main group I’ve seen advocating against BCBS following Medicare’s charging rules has been the American Society of Anesthesiologists. Which makes sense—of course anesthesiologists would be against policies that decrease their pay. (By the way, the mean anesthesiologist salary in the US is $340,000 per year. https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes291211.htm) This walkback is a great PR victory for them.
Insurance companies are, of course, evil grifters. They have incentive to lower costs by cutting necessary care. But this particular policy is copied from Medicare, which doesn’t have the same incentives as an insurance company. Part of the dysfunction of the US health care system is that our procedure costs are unreasonably high. That doesn’t come from insurance companies and Medicare, it comes from doctors and hospitals. We can’t paper over that.
You refer to Anthem walking back its decision to charge anesthesiologists
according to Medicare standards (average time of procedure, rather than
recorded time).
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-41.pdf
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/05/nx-s1-5217617/blue-cross-blue...
https://www.vox.com/policy/390031/anthem-blue-cross-blue-shi...
a sign that the providers are overcharging