Luigi Mangione is scheduled to be sentenced on December 18, 2026. He became something of a folk hero after killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a health insurance company widely reviled for its practice of putting up block after block to prevent having to pay for the health care of its subscribers even when they faced life-threatening situations and even died because of the denials.
In his usual thorough way, John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight dissects the odious practices of UnitedHealthcare and the even worse practices of its lesser-known but even bigger parent company UnitedHealth Group which, it turns out, is the third biggest corporation in the US. He looks at how it got so profitable by adopting practices that have infuriated both patients and doctors alike.
The obscene profits and behavior of these health insurance companies have to end and we have to create a single payer system that puts them out of business. As Oliver says, “at best they are pointless time wasting middlemen and at worst algorithmically driven, ruthless arbiters of who lives and who dies.”
Guess which company my employer uses for health insurance! Haven’t had any problems yet, but I haven’t had any serious medical issues in the last few years.
In the broad scale of things, I’d say that when you get right down to it, one of the biggest issues in the U.S. is this massive case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. There are so many people who would rather not have benefits or social safety nets at all if there’s any risk that the ‘wrong’ people might get help from them. Reagan’s ‘welfare queens’ rhetoric solidified a lot of that attitude, but the issue predates him considerably.
And so the U.S. can end up spending more on ‘means testing’ to see who actually deserves the money than the money that they’re actually handing out. This is one of those situations where it is actually cheaper to accept a certain level of fraud rather than put up barriers, but to a disturbingly large number of people, the barriers are the point.
Didn’t Sarah Palin warn us that the liberals were establishing death camps? Every accusation a confession, as the saying goes.
AARP is in bed with United Health Group. AARP makes more of it’s income from United Health Group than from membership dues. To join the United Health Care Medicare programs, you have to become a member of AARP. And AARP endorses only United Health Care medicare programs -- not those of other insurance companies. Consequently, AARP’s lobbying is tainted by its being a shill for United Health Care.
When AARP fought against ObamaCare (to the benefit of its partner United Health Care) I decided never to join AARP. Today I feel even more strongly about that decision.
@3: death panels, not death camps.
If UnitedHealthcare is so bad why doesn’t it go out of business due to lack of customers? Is it because of employers who don’t care enough about their employees to provide them with good health care, and buy on a basis of price?
US law requires all people within certain constraints to have private insurance, and the insurance market is a monopoly or duopoly in most areas.