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Category: United Healthcare

  • CEO Shooting Exposes Injustices That Get Too Little Attention

    “In a fairer world, Brian Thompson wouldn’t have been murdered. He would already have been put behind bars,” writes foreign policy analyst Sunjeev Bery.  And Bery is right.  Others have made this point over the last few years, that companies like UnitedHealth are deep cesspools of irredeemable, psychopathic corruption, which in UnitedHealth’s specific case prevents doctors from relieving suffering and saving lives.  The shooting of Thompson, their CEO, calls attention to many serious flaws in our society besides the corruption of the profit-obsessed health insurance industry, but let’s focus on just two.

    The post CEO Shooting Exposes Injustices That Get Too Little Attention appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Behind UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Is A Larger System Of Corporate Rule

    The killing of UnitedHealthcare’s Brian Thompson — a brazen assassination of a wealthy CEO in the streets of midtown Manhattan — shocked the United States. But the tsunami of mass anger unleashed against a hated for-profit health care system has so far defined the story in the news. The killing sparked a deluge of personal testimonies of horrifying experiences with health insurance corporations. Dark humor around the shooting continues to flood social media.

    Millions of people in the U.S. viscerally hate health insurance corporations, and see these companies and their CEOs as symbols of the worst kind of corporate greed.

    The post Behind UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Is A Larger System Of Corporate Rule appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • As the Tories Americanise the NHS, we all need to be yelling ‘stop’

    In John Pilger’s 2019 documentary The Dirty War on the NHS, campaigner Dr Bob Gill says:

    The NHS has been repurposed from a public service to something for profit extraction. And all the changes we have seen have just been about liberating up these potential assets for the corporate raiders to take them over.

    This is a stark warning about attacks on the NHS by capitalists. Yet the campaign to save the NHS, relative to the destruction that could be on the way, doesn’t appear to reflect that. I say this not to knock the excellent work of tireless campaigners around the country, but to remind people of how serious this current assault on the NHS is.

    Capitalists have waged a war on the NHS for decades, and they appear to be winning. So now, as the Tories’ Health and Care Bill powers its way through the Houses of Parliament, we need to wage a war to save the publicly run health service that was once the envy of the world. Because should the profit-driven capitalists get their way, the NHS could become little more than a mirror image of the dystopian US healthcare system. A system that’s dominated by profit-driven health insurance corporations and run at the expense of sick, injured and disabled people.

    Let’s sound the alarm bells

    The people who really care deeply about our health service are sounding the alarm bells. They believe this bill spells the end of the NHS as we know it. And it’ll be a “legislative lock-in for the changes already embedded throughout the NHS”. It will also cost people more while delivering less. This bill, if it becomes law, will consolidate a privatisation agenda as they sell off parts of the NHS to the highest bidder.

    Successive UK governments, in full public view, have enacted this. Yet it feels as if there’s an absence of outrage. Why aren’t we all yelling ‘stop’ with the ferocity this deserves? How is it that a local campaign to save a local hospital can get 25,000 people on the street, but a national campaign can’t do something comparable?

    Given the cut-throat capitalistic policies of successive Tory and neo-liberal Blairite governments, attacks on a valuable and free public service aren’t at all surprising.

    Sajid Javid certainly wasn’t the first

    Let’s take a look at this stealthy path towards NHS privatisation, culminating in this damaging bill which is currently in the House of Lords.

    Nye Bevan, the Labour minister credited with founding the NHS, famously said “the NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it”. The NHS faced opposition before it even started in 1948. And Bevan himself admitted he only got doctors and its trade union, the British Medical Association (BMA), on board by “stuffing their mouths with gold”.

    The NHS has been under attack since that time. In fact, Bevan resigned just three years after its founding over the introduction of dental and spectacle charges.

    From there, one of the first organised attacks on the NHS started with Arthur Seldon. Seldon was a Thatcherite and once adviser to “cross-party” think tank Demos. He wrote the book After the N.H.S.: Reflections on the Development of Private Health Insurance in Britain in the 1970s. Seldon, as well as others at the right-wing Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) think tank, put forward in a report “the advantages of user payments and private medical insurance instead of the NHS”.

    Furthermore, Thatcher targeted the health service for privatisation when she came to power in 1979. Documents from 1977, before Thatcher took power, show they were already planning to privatise key public services.

    Thatcher hands it over

    Following the Thatcher and John Major years, the Blair and Brown regime took up the mantle. During their time, according to director Ken Loach, they increased NHS privatisation and also outsourced medical and cleaning services. In his documentary The Great NHS Heist, Gill laid out the timeline of NHS privatisation from the early 1980s until 2014:

    Gill says “the number of beds per head of population, has more than halved since the 1970s”. When Gill spoke to The Canary in July 2021, he explained:

    We have the lowest bed capacity per head of population compared to all other OECD countries of similar economic status. We have the fewest number of doctors per head in Europe. And by the time we entered the pandemic, we’d suffered a historic freeze of annual increase in the budget of around 1% on average over the decade, where since 1948 it’s averaged about 4%.

    As shown in the figure above, the Health and Social Care Act became law in 2012. According to Gill, it then became a:

    defunded, repurposed, marketised NHS with a huge hole in the workforce – 10,000 vacancies in doctors, 40,000 nurse vacancies – and then we were hit with a pandemic. So this was a disaster waiting to happen.

    Integrated Care Systems

    According to Gill, one of the biggest changes proposed in this latest bill is the creation of Integrated Care Systems (ICS). But instead of integrating or improving healthcare, as its name suggests, these ICSs will integrate and be:

    based on the US Medicare, Medicaid system – which is dominated by big private insurance companies like United Health, the world’s biggest private insurer – where the government, the taxpayer, puts in the money, but the management of that money is with a private insurer. And they are allowed to make profit… out of the ICS budget.

    Gill also explained that the “terminology is deceptive”. Because it’s not about integrating the clinical services for improvement, but about “integrating the budgets”:

    to pull over social care budgets… into NHS budgets over time, and all primary care and secondary care budgets, and give responsibility for control of all that money to an arms length new public-private entity called an integrated care board.

    Now this integrated care board, on the board will be sitting all the private corporations that have been awarded outsourcing contracts over the years. And what most people are unaware of, is that this legislation is making legal what has been going on behind the scenes very quietly for over a decade. Which is, corporations such as the big four accountancy firms, the management consultancies like McKinseys, the outsourcing giants like Serco, they have all been at the heart of the backroom function of the NHS…

    So they’ve already been in place, this is not some hypothetical threat, the corporations are embedded within the NHS, and what the creation of the new legal entity will do is formally transfer power from government… to this new public-private entity. So that’s a massive step.

    In Consortium News last December, Gill and public policy analyst Stewart Player warned of creeping “Americanization of the NHS” and “the penetration of the healthcare system by the giant U.S. insurer UnitedHealth”. They believe the current bill, with its 42 regional-scale ICSs, is proof of this. And they believe it’s being:

    effectively designed and fast-tracked by the private UnitedHealth.

    The severity of Private Finance Initiatives (PFI)

    As Gill told The Canary, the Blair years also saw the private sector being allowed “to saddle the NHS estate, land, and buildings with PFI debt”. PFI uses private money to build public infrastructure such as hospitals or schools. These are then leased to the government but owned by the private institution. It was actually introduced by the Tories, but Blair’s Labour drove it forward with enthusiasm.

    Gill told us this saddling of debt can:

    then be used as an excuse to flog off land

    And PFI:

    also handed over ownership to the private sector. So you had the assets being privatised.

    In 2010, PFI investor David Metter received dividends of £8.6m. He had a stake in 19 hospitals. In 2013, BBC’s Panorama likened overall PFI programme to a credit card, because:

    they buy now, we all pay later

    In 2018, the chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland said PFI was a “fraud on the people”. And the Independent reported the PFI bill for NHS hospitals was projected to be above £79bn. A considerably high price on its own, but significantly higher than the build cost of £11.4bn.

    In 2019, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) found that £13bn invested by the private sector in new hospitals would cost the NHS in England £80bn. Some trusts spent one-sixth of their budget repaying debts because of PFI.

    But there’s still time to save the NHS

    Large as the Tory majority is, Boris Johnson – assuming he survives much longer – certainly doesn’t have the loyalty of his ranks. And if public pressure is brought to bear, it could once again force change. Tory MPs or House of Lords members could possibly rebel if they believed there was significant public opposition to this bill, or indeed if they believed their own position was under threat.

    There’s so much we need to defend at present. It’s essential the NHS is part of that, and that every individual plays their part. The campaign to stop this assault on our health needs to be as loud as the campaigns for our planet’s survival and the campaigns that stand up for our civil and human rights. It’s really is that important.

    Because if we all don’t stand up now, what we know and cherish most about our health service could very well be a distant memory. A mirror image of the US’s profit-driven ‘healthcare’ system.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons – SLaMNHSFT & Pixabay – TheDigitalArtist

    By Peadar O'Cearnaigh

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Perfidy Meets Putty: Congressional Democrats Betray Voters

    Do you remember the promises made by the Democratic Party’s presidential and Congressional candidates on universal health insurance? You can forget their pledges and somber convictions now that your votes put the Democrats in charge of the House and the Senate. The Democrats’ leaders are abandoning their promises and retreating into a cowardly corporatist future.

    Here is the present scene. Leading Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have decided to spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize the giant health insurance companies like Aetna and United Healthcare to “cover recently laid-off workers and those who purchase their own coverage,” as the New York Times reported. There are no price restraints on the gouging insurance premiums or loophole-ridden policies. That is why giant corporate socialist insurers love the “American Rescue Plan,” which gives them socialist cash on the barrelhead. The law lets insurers decide how and whether they pay healthcare bills with co-pays, deductibles, or grant waivers. All these anti-consumer details are buried in the endless and inscrutable fine print.

    Whatever happened to the Democrats’ (Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pramila Jayapal, etc.) demand for single-payer – everybody in, nobody out – with free choice of doctors and hospitals instead of the existing cruel, and profiteering industry for which enough is never enough? Senator Sanders often mentioned a Yale study, published on February 15, 2020, that found:

    Although health care expenditure per capita is higher in the USA than in any other country, more than 37 million Americans do not have health insurance, and 41 million more have inadequate access to care. Efforts are ongoing to repeal the Affordable Care Act which would exacerbate health-care inequities. By contrast, a universal system, such as that proposed in the Medicare for All Act, has the potential to transform the availability and efficiency of American health-care services. Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than $450 billion annually….” (See the study: Improving the Prognosis of Health Care in the USA, February 15, 2020).

    Well, House Speaker Pelosi is discouraging House Democrats from supporting Representative Pramila Jayapal’s H.R. 1384, Medicare for All Act of 2019, the gold standard for single-payer. News reports indicate that Representative Jayapal (D-WA) and Representative. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) will reintroduce their Medicare for All bill next week. Speaker Pelosi is telling Democrats in the House to focus instead on the modest expansion of Obamacare with its corporate welfare, utter complexity and seriously inadequate coverage. Almost eighty million Americans are presently uninsured or underinsured – a level that will not be significantly reduced for deprived workers by tweaking Obamacare during the Covid-19 pandemic.

    A modified Obamacare, with no price ceilings, will hardly reduce the tens of thousands of American deaths every year because people cannot afford health insurance to get diagnosed and treated in time to prevent fatalities. The Yale study also found that: “ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68,000 lives and 1.73 million life-years every year compared with the status quo.” Tweaking Obamacare does little to stem the relentless surge in healthcare prices and profits in our country, which is unique for not placing billing ceilings on medical procedures and drugs. This “get whatever you can” behavior by the vendors is so uncontrolled that healthcare billing fraud and abuse is costing people one billion dollars A DAY! Malcolm Sparrow, who is an applied mathematician at Harvard, estimates medical billing fraud amounts to at least ten percent of all healthcare expenses each year.

    Obamacare does nothing to limit the perverse incentives of a fee-for-service system that includes unnecessary operations, over-diagnosis, and over-prescribing all of which increase the risks of preventable casualties. A Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine peer-reviewed study in 2016 estimates that close to 5000 lives are lost weekly due to such “preventable problems” just in hospitals (see: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in the U.S., May 3, 2016).

    It gets worse. Year after year, the corporate Democrats, along with the Republicans, are facilitating expanding corporate takeovers of Medicare and Medicaid. The giant and widening attack on Medicare is called “Medicare Advantage,” which more accurately should be called “Medicare [Dis]advantage.” Our corporatized government, under both Parties, has been allowing deceptive promotional seductions of elderly people to take Medicare [Dis]advantage – now fully 40% of all Medicare beneficiaries – which is just a corporate insurance plan with multiple undisclosed tripwires.

    Former President Trump worsened what he inherited from the Democrats in outsourcing Medicare. He launched something called “direct contracting” that, “could fully turn Medicare over to private health insurers” declared Diane Archer, former chair of Consumer Reports, in her article on March 8, 2021. Medicare Advantage premiums can be pricey. According to Kay Tillow, Executive Director of the Nurses Professional Organization, “The Medicare Advantage Plans are smiling all the way to the bank. In 2019 each Medicare Advantage beneficiary cost taxpayers $11,822 while those in original Medicare cost $10,813 each – that’s over $1,000 more and over 9% more per person for the for-profit insurers!”

    Where is the outcry among Democratic politicians to reverse completely the corporate takeover of Medicare? Last year, many Democratic candidates pontificated about the need for single-payer health insurance, but now in Congress, we are scarcely hearing a peep about this vital human right. Their campaign rhetoric is just distant memory. Tragically, it is now harder than ever for the elderly to get out of Medicare [Dis]advantage and go back to traditional Medicare.

    Millions of elderly people are deceived by televised marketing lies and slick brochures.  The hapless Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should investigate and end the deceptions. Congressional investigations and hearings are long overdue. As the authoritative Dr. Fred Hyde says about the so-called Medicare Advantage: “It’s not what you pay, it’s what you get.” That is, the corporate health plan works until they get sick, until “they want their doctor and their hospital.” Dr. Hyde was referring to the narrow networks where these companies park their beneficiaries.

    More astonishing in this story of the rapacious corporate takeover of Medicare is that AARP promotes these flawed plans to their members, takes paid ads by big insurers in AARP publications, and derives income from this collaboration.

    Imagine, over 50,000 SEIU retirees are automatically placed by their unions in these Medicare [Dis]advantage traps without first being allowed to choose traditional Medicare.

    This whole sordid sabotage of the nineteen sixties Democrats’ dream, under President Lyndon Johnson, of taking the first step toward universal healthcare coverage for everyone, begs for more exposes. It begs for more clamor by the progressive Democrats in Congress who are strangely passive so far. I’m speaking of Representatives Jayapal, Raskin, Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and the receding “Squad,” as well as Senators Warren and Sanders. If we can’t expect these stalwarts to start the counterattack that will save lives, save trillions of dollars over the years, focus on prevention not just treatment, and diminish the anxiety, dread, and fear, that the citizens of Canada and other western nations do not experience because they are insured from birth on, who is left to defend the American people against the arrogant health insurance corporate barons?

    I’m sending this column to these self-styled progressive Democrats along with a two-page specific critique of corporate Medicare from the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) website. PNHP’s membership counts over 15,000 pro-single-payer physicians. In a comment on the PNHP site, Don McCanne, M.D., says, “Remember, the mission of private, for-profit Medicare Advantage insurers is to make money, whereas the mission of our traditional Medicare program is to provide health care. We are supporting a program that deferentially caters to the private insurers and their interests when we should be supporting a program that is designed to take care of patients. Those being deceived by the private Medicare Advantage marketing materials really do not realize the bad deal they may be getting until they face the private insurer barriers to needed care. Silver Sneakers won’t take care of that.” (See: https://pnhp.org/news/russell-mokhiber-explains-why-private-medicare-advantage-plans-are-a-bad-deal/)

    If you care about this issue, tell your Members of Congress it is time to pass Medicare for All represented by H.R. 1384.

    The post Perfidy Meets Putty: Congressional Democrats Betray Voters first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Perfidy Meets Putty: Congressional Democrats Betray Voters

    Do you remember the promises made by the Democratic Party’s presidential and Congressional candidates on universal health insurance? You can forget their pledges and somber convictions now that your votes put the Democrats in charge of the House and the Senate. The Democrats’ leaders are abandoning their promises and retreating into a cowardly corporatist future.

    Here is the present scene. Leading Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have decided to spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize the giant health insurance companies like Aetna and United Healthcare to “cover recently laid-off workers and those who purchase their own coverage,” as the New York Times reported. There are no price restraints on the gouging insurance premiums or loophole-ridden policies. That is why giant corporate socialist insurers love the “American Rescue Plan,” which gives them socialist cash on the barrelhead. The law lets insurers decide how and whether they pay healthcare bills with co-pays, deductibles, or grant waivers. All these anti-consumer details are buried in the endless and inscrutable fine print.

    Whatever happened to the Democrats’ (Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pramila Jayapal, etc.) demand for single-payer – everybody in, nobody out – with free choice of doctors and hospitals instead of the existing cruel, and profiteering industry for which enough is never enough? Senator Sanders often mentioned a Yale study, published on February 15, 2020, that found:

    Although health care expenditure per capita is higher in the USA than in any other country, more than 37 million Americans do not have health insurance, and 41 million more have inadequate access to care. Efforts are ongoing to repeal the Affordable Care Act which would exacerbate health-care inequities. By contrast, a universal system, such as that proposed in the Medicare for All Act, has the potential to transform the availability and efficiency of American health-care services. Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than $450 billion annually….” (See the study: Improving the Prognosis of Health Care in the USA, February 15, 2020).

    Well, House Speaker Pelosi is discouraging House Democrats from supporting Representative Pramila Jayapal’s H.R. 1384, Medicare for All Act of 2019, the gold standard for single-payer. News reports indicate that Representative Jayapal (D-WA) and Representative. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) will reintroduce their Medicare for All bill next week. Speaker Pelosi is telling Democrats in the House to focus instead on the modest expansion of Obamacare with its corporate welfare, utter complexity and seriously inadequate coverage. Almost eighty million Americans are presently uninsured or underinsured – a level that will not be significantly reduced for deprived workers by tweaking Obamacare during the Covid-19 pandemic.

    A modified Obamacare, with no price ceilings, will hardly reduce the tens of thousands of American deaths every year because people cannot afford health insurance to get diagnosed and treated in time to prevent fatalities. The Yale study also found that: “ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68,000 lives and 1.73 million life-years every year compared with the status quo.” Tweaking Obamacare does little to stem the relentless surge in healthcare prices and profits in our country, which is unique for not placing billing ceilings on medical procedures and drugs. This “get whatever you can” behavior by the vendors is so uncontrolled that healthcare billing fraud and abuse is costing people one billion dollars A DAY! Malcolm Sparrow, who is an applied mathematician at Harvard, estimates medical billing fraud amounts to at least ten percent of all healthcare expenses each year.

    Obamacare does nothing to limit the perverse incentives of a fee-for-service system that includes unnecessary operations, over-diagnosis, and over-prescribing all of which increase the risks of preventable casualties. A Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine peer-reviewed study in 2016 estimates that close to 5000 lives are lost weekly due to such “preventable problems” just in hospitals (see: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in the U.S., May 3, 2016).

    It gets worse. Year after year, the corporate Democrats, along with the Republicans, are facilitating expanding corporate takeovers of Medicare and Medicaid. The giant and widening attack on Medicare is called “Medicare Advantage,” which more accurately should be called “Medicare [Dis]advantage.” Our corporatized government, under both Parties, has been allowing deceptive promotional seductions of elderly people to take Medicare [Dis]advantage – now fully 40% of all Medicare beneficiaries – which is just a corporate insurance plan with multiple undisclosed tripwires.

    Former President Trump worsened what he inherited from the Democrats in outsourcing Medicare. He launched something called “direct contracting” that, “could fully turn Medicare over to private health insurers” declared Diane Archer, former chair of Consumer Reports, in her article on March 8, 2021. Medicare Advantage premiums can be pricey. According to Kay Tillow, Executive Director of the Nurses Professional Organization, “The Medicare Advantage Plans are smiling all the way to the bank. In 2019 each Medicare Advantage beneficiary cost taxpayers $11,822 while those in original Medicare cost $10,813 each – that’s over $1,000 more and over 9% more per person for the for-profit insurers!”

    Where is the outcry among Democratic politicians to reverse completely the corporate takeover of Medicare? Last year, many Democratic candidates pontificated about the need for single-payer health insurance, but now in Congress, we are scarcely hearing a peep about this vital human right. Their campaign rhetoric is just distant memory. Tragically, it is now harder than ever for the elderly to get out of Medicare [Dis]advantage and go back to traditional Medicare.

    Millions of elderly people are deceived by televised marketing lies and slick brochures.  The hapless Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should investigate and end the deceptions. Congressional investigations and hearings are long overdue. As the authoritative Dr. Fred Hyde says about the so-called Medicare Advantage: “It’s not what you pay, it’s what you get.” That is, the corporate health plan works until they get sick, until “they want their doctor and their hospital.” Dr. Hyde was referring to the narrow networks where these companies park their beneficiaries.

    More astonishing in this story of the rapacious corporate takeover of Medicare is that AARP promotes these flawed plans to their members, takes paid ads by big insurers in AARP publications, and derives income from this collaboration.

    Imagine, over 50,000 SEIU retirees are automatically placed by their unions in these Medicare [Dis]advantage traps without first being allowed to choose traditional Medicare.

    This whole sordid sabotage of the nineteen sixties Democrats’ dream, under President Lyndon Johnson, of taking the first step toward universal healthcare coverage for everyone, begs for more exposes. It begs for more clamor by the progressive Democrats in Congress who are strangely passive so far. I’m speaking of Representatives Jayapal, Raskin, Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and the receding “Squad,” as well as Senators Warren and Sanders. If we can’t expect these stalwarts to start the counterattack that will save lives, save trillions of dollars over the years, focus on prevention not just treatment, and diminish the anxiety, dread, and fear, that the citizens of Canada and other western nations do not experience because they are insured from birth on, who is left to defend the American people against the arrogant health insurance corporate barons?

    I’m sending this column to these self-styled progressive Democrats along with a two-page specific critique of corporate Medicare from the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) website. PNHP’s membership counts over 15,000 pro-single-payer physicians. In a comment on the PNHP site, Don McCanne, M.D., says, “Remember, the mission of private, for-profit Medicare Advantage insurers is to make money, whereas the mission of our traditional Medicare program is to provide health care. We are supporting a program that deferentially caters to the private insurers and their interests when we should be supporting a program that is designed to take care of patients. Those being deceived by the private Medicare Advantage marketing materials really do not realize the bad deal they may be getting until they face the private insurer barriers to needed care. Silver Sneakers won’t take care of that.” (See: https://pnhp.org/news/russell-mokhiber-explains-why-private-medicare-advantage-plans-are-a-bad-deal/)

    If you care about this issue, tell your Members of Congress it is time to pass Medicare for All represented by H.R. 1384.

    This article was posted on Saturday, March 13th, 2021 at 7:18am and is filed under Democrats, Health/Medical.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.