Brian Thompson's Boss Does Not Care
Andrew Witty, CEO of UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of murdered United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson, is doubling down on their policies.
A member of your exclusive multimillion-dollar CEO club getting gunned down outside your investor conference in a case that increasingly looks to be directly tied to denial-of-care policies might get some people to reconsider their life choices, or review their policies to see if maybe they’ve gone too far in the name of boosting profits.
Brian Thompson’s boss, Andrew Witty, the head of UnitedHealth Group, inclusive of OptumRX, United HealthCare, March VisionCare, Golden Rule Insurance Company (who have been screwing customers going back to the first term of Bill Clinton’s presidency so badly he name-dropped them in an argument with Newt Gingrich during the 1995 fight over Medicare funding), and Matria Healthcare, is not one of those people. In the third such leak to journalists in the week since Thompson was assassinated, an internal video from Witty to all UHG employees has gone public, which you can watch at Ken Klippenstein’s Substack below.
From foxbusiness.com, the money quote:
"We guard against the pressures that exist for unsafe care or for unnecessary care to be delivered in a way which makes the whole system too complex and ultimately unsustainable," Witty said.
He added that employees should "tune out" criticism of the insurance company, saying that it "does not reflect reality."
So few words, so much to unpack here.
The pressures for unsafe care or for unnecessary care.
This clown really thinks he’s making a statement. He’s the bold leader protecting patients from their evil doctors, using untested treatments or pushing for additional procedures that don’t value the patient’s health. That’s the subtext of that statement. They, the for-profit health insurance behemoth with a stock share price north of five hundred dollars, are the good guys, and the doctors who perform lifesaving surgeries and administer treatments, are the bad guys.
It’s a bad joke, delivered by a corporate chieftain so out-of-touch he makes Michael Scott from The Office look like a paragon of self-awareness. This is so laughable on its face that even his own employees don’t believe it, because they keep leaking this stuff to the media. Again, from Klippenstein:
“Thompson took massive pay outs while we at the bottom had to work harder and longer,” one employee told me. “Meanwhile Witty brought in AI to learn from us. So they have the money for AI and massive bonuses, but we’re still using software that is massively behind the industry standard. They’ve been lying to us.”
UnitedHealthcare, which insures more than 10 percent of the American population, made $8.9 billion in profit through the first three quarters of this year.
Company financial disclosures show that Thompson’s annual compensation, including bonuses, was $10.2 million. In March, Thompson was sued by a firefighters pension accusing him of selling off $15 million of company stock during a Justice Department antitrust investigation, as I wrote about yesterday. The UnitedHealth Care employee also criticized Thompson’s reported sale of $5.6 million in company stock the same day as news of a ransomware attack plunged the stock’s value by 8 percent.
Brian Thompson was not a good man. That smiling, casual corporate photo belied another greedy, self-serving executive, dumping over twenty million dollars in stock before its value dropped—because he knew about, in order, a massive ransomware attack that exposed HIPAA protected information and a federal investigation into fraudulent claim denials that were going to be made public. The average employee, when they have stock options in a company, have to go through a long, drawn-out process to sell their stock. I know. I’ve done it myself before at a prior employer and it’s a miserable gauntlet. The regular people working jobs much lower paid than Thompson had to eat their losses each time stock prices dropped because they weren’t forewarned about the bad news and couldn’t sell quickly even if they were. Executives don’t play by the rules, though. They lobby the government buy off Members of Congress and regulators and nobody punishes them for their illegal acts.
You do not make just under nine billion dollars of profit in nine months’ time in health insurance unless you are engaged in a massive fraudulent effort to deny care to policyholders. Healthcare is expensive, made even more so by these very parasitical companies, and it’s been reported that United has a much higher denial rate for care than other for-profits in the field.
One glimmer of hope is that two very politically opposed senators, Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley, have co-sponsored a bill requiring companies like United to dump their prescription mail-order pharmacies to remain as insurers. That’s one small step towards regaining control over costs. The next step should be legislation banning for-profit care (or failing that, because I recognize this country is regressively stupid about its own best interests), or impose a federal monitor over the industry and tax profits above a certain number (a number that should be as low as possible). Single-payer is probably further off now than it was before the Affordable Care Act, but I maintain it should remain our ultimate goal.
Employees should tune out criticism of UnitedHealth, because it’s not based in reality.
The reality is in every patient denied care for any treatment.
The reality is in every patient who was denied care and suffered permanent harm or death.
The reality is in an accountant or a bloody AI program deciding what is “medically necessary,” which is code for whatever looks best on the Excel spreadsheet every quarter.
The reality is in every patient who has had to fight with adjusters and claim reps and appeals departments for the care that they pay into, week after week, year after year.
The reality is in rejecting claims just to see if you, the patient, will fight it or just admit defeat and eat the cost.
The reality is in having your CEO get gunned down in the middle of Manhattan in a precise assassination at your investor conference, and you are too pigheaded to do anything but instruct the employees to put their fingers in their ears and keep marching forward to ensure the profits roll in.
This attitude got Brian Thompson killed. I am not advocating we simply start murdering executives, but if this moment fails pour encourager les autres1, then it will happen again, and again, and again. It is rare that the political left and right are united on anything, but condemnation and righteous anger at health insurance executives raking in cash while patients suffer is one of those rarities. Change will have to come, one way or another. Better for all of us if it’s nonviolent, clowns like Andrew Witty included. If it isn’t, though, I won’t shed many tears for executives who had fair warning, and whose hands are stained with the blood of every person who died after denial of care.
"To encourage [the] others,” the most well-known part of a longer quote by the French philosopher Voltaire, who wrote in his 1759 novel Candide “il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres—in this country, from time to time, it is necessary to kill an admiral to encourage the others.”