The fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as he headed to a shareholder meeting should not have come as a surprise. The U.S. is a gun-obsessed culture and leads the world in gun fatalities. What was more shocking was the outpouring of “he had it coming” posts on social media.
Whether or not the killer was motivated by a personal experience with United, the numerous posts referenced people’s rage at the health insurance industry.
Should we be surprised?
Recent years have seen health insurance rates soar and out-of-pocket costs skyrocket. Even those with employer-provided health insurance are often unable to pay for needed care as deductibles and copays keep rising.
At the same time, the industry has had one black eye after another, with multiple insurers in the news.
Private health insurance companies offering Medicare Advantage plans routinely overstate the health problems of their enrollees to get unjustified extra payments from the government.
A former Aetna medical director admitted under oath that he never looked at patients’ records when deciding whether to approve or deny care but simply rubber-stamped the nurse reviewers’ decisions.
United was castigated by a Senate committee for using algorithms to deny care and it was noted that the denial rate for rehab care after hospitalization rose from 10.9% in 2020 to 22.7% in 2022.
Denying care is good for insurers’ profits, and these profits flow into executive salaries. The CEOs of America’s six largest health insurers took home a total of $122,970,614 in total compensation in 2023.
Taking money from employers and individuals and paying medical bills is not rocket science and does not warrant sky-high profits. Medicare operates with an overhead of about 3% while private insurers charge 15% or more.
As I document in my book, some 25% of U.S. “health care” expenditure does not go to health care but to administrative overhead.
We need to get the excess profits out of health insurance companies and put that money towards patient care.
Shooting one CEO will not change the culture. We must hold our legislators’ feet to the fire and get the excess profits out of health insurance, whether at the state or the federal level.
Edward Hoffer MD is Associate Professor of Medicine, part-time, at Harvard.
What Does The Doctor Say?
By Dr. Edward Hoffer