The CEO of United Health Care, a health insurance company, was murdered. Murder is wrong.
I had my own experience with United Health Care. I did not murder anyone.
I can believe there are lots of people with a motive.
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| Smiling |
It became clear to me that a routine part of the business model for United Health Care was to make filing claims difficult and frustrating. Bad service was policy. It was a feature, not a bug. If filing a claim for reimbursement is a pain, then maybe some people won't bother, which saves the company money.
A second strategy is delay. The insurance company gets to keep the premium money drawing interest until the benefit is paid out, and maybe some claims just disappear as paperwork goes back and forth. I discovered that every claim I made to United Health Care was rejected as a matter of course. Doctors considered the pregnancy that led to the birth of our son, Dillon, to be high-risk. This meant there were a number of tests prescribed early in the pregnancy. Under the claim procedure, I was to pay the health care provider immediately, and then send United Health Care the claim form and receipts. They would reimburse me.
All of the seven or eight claims were rejected, which put an extra 10 weeks into every reimbursement. Every denial said they questioned whether this claim arose from a workplace injury or a traffic accident and that I should submit evidence showing the contrary. For well-mother and well-baby pregnancy tests! The claim could be re-submitted as an appeal from the rejection.
At first it seemed funny. I wrote addendums. No, the pregnancy wasn't an accident; it was a planned and welcomed pregnancy, and it sure the heck didn't happen by cars colliding. No, the tests on the baby are not remotely a workplace injury. It was clear no human was reading the original claim, nor paying attention to the two boxes I checked attesting that it wasn't a traffic or workplace injury.
So maddening.
It changed nothing. United Health Care people would see this note, reject my reimbursement, and write that they questioned whether the pregnancy tests were due to a traffic or workplace injury.
It stopped being funny. I have been angry with them for 34 years so far, but not angry enough to murder anyone.
Will the murder of the company's CEO cause any change in the company's policy? I don't know. It may have already changed; I am happily on Medicare now and long gone from UHC. Maybe this procedure saves United Health tens of millions of dollars a year in claim payouts. Employees aren't their client. The companies (Citigroup and Morgan Stanley) are the clients. Maybe the names of company executives are flagged for better treatment. I don't know. I was at the bottom end of the system and like most employees in company-paid health plans, I took the policy the HR department made available and got whatever treatment they handed out.
But maybe a murder like this changes the calculation in the board rooms. The inscriptions on the bullets get attention. My stories of goldenrod attachments did not.
We are in a new era of politics and public communication. The president-elect talks of martial law, detention camps, death penalties, and shooting people who cross the border. It isn't my style, but I recognize that a great many Americans seem to have a taste for that kind of he-man, Hulk Hogan-style action. The coin of the realm is strength, with maybe a little cruelty mixed in. Violence is body language. It shows that you really mean it.
This is the world we are living in.
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6 comments:
This may be the world we are living in, but it doesn’t have to be this way. If people insisted on doing the right thing, there wouldn’t be deliberately bad service. An example would be the election workers and officials who resisted pressure from the most powerful man in the world to overturn the 2020 election. Some call it heroic. I call it doing their job. If we all were to treat others as we would like to be treated, what a wonderful world this would be.
I had Kaiser Permanente HMO for my entire adult career, from 1975 to 2019 when I retired. Those last 2 years from 2018-2019 with Kaiser's Medicare Advantage. No complaints, even though many hated Kaiser with a passion.
Kaiser was able to do almost everything we needed. Sometimes, they sent us out of network, and they took care of everything.
When we moved to Florida, we chose UHC Medicare Advantage in our Villages Health community. Again, no complaints. Everything we've needed has been approved without any issues.
Yes, I understand that UHC has problems in some states.
Our Villages Health organization does not accept all insurance, or all ordinary Medicare, nor all Medicare Advantage plans. They only accept Medicare Advantage from UHC, Florida Blue, and Humana. Service for us has been excellent.
Peter was fortunate that there were no bad effects on his wife or future child that resulted from those insurance delays. It was aggravating for him, but violence under those circumstances was not his style.
Picture a similar situation, but the wife and child die as a result of those delays. Killing the CEO of the company that caused those deaths might still not be Peter’s style. But I am pretty sure that there are a lot of people in this country who would be thinking that way, and a smaller but still significant subset willing and capable of carrying it out.
I consider myself a Democratic Socialist. In my view, assigning a profit motive to health-related interventions should be secondary to the quality and accessibility of care. Ethical cost-benefit healthcare models must prioritize appropriate standards of care. This includes evaluating risk-benefit models and ensuring their efficacy is clearly established. A vibrant and healthy society requires a basic standard of care borne, where necessary, by the community. Infectious diseases and prevention treatments should be freely accessible to maintain a healthy and able citizenry.
I am a Kaiser Advantage Plus subscriber, and my wife and children have been members since 1972. The firstborn cost $35, and the second cost nothing.
That's why the U.S. has more guns than people: so we can seek retribution for our grievances, whether real or imagined.
If elected leaders looked out for their citizens rather than their donors I think fewer people would think violence is a solution.
Even when violence is directed at US politicians their reaction is to make themselves safer, and screw the rest of us.
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