Morgan Lavoie

So let's rewind. Let's talk about what we know about UnitedHealthcare.

UnitedHealthcare is part of the health insurance conglomerate UnitedHealth Group, which is the fifth largest company in the United States by revenue and the largest insurance company in the United States. It's also the largest provider of Medicare Advantage, which is a type of health insurance you might get if you're over 65.

United Health Group is a public company and their stock is up 63% compared to its price five years ago. In Gia's piece, she notes that United Healthcare has the highest claim denial rate of any private insurance company. It denies 32% of claims. Claim denial is a profitability driver for healthcare companies. When Thompson was killed, he was actually headed into an investor conference.

In that conference, claim denial rate was likely going to be a topic of discussion. In fact, according to Vox, the most watched number on every earnings call for an insurance company is the, quote, medical loss ratio, which is the percentage of premiums that are spent on paying out claims. Shareholders want to see that number low. The patients, of course, would want to see that number high.

If the number is higher than expected, the share price of the stock can suffer. Jia also points out that one driver of UnitedHealth's high claim denials is a software they use called NaviHealth, which is an algorithm that provides care recommendations for patients, including when care is no longer necessary after a surgery or illness.

In 2023, a class action lawsuit alleges that Navi Health has a known error rate of 90%. This means that many people have had to face the choice of either going without care that they, by statistic likelihood, actually need or pay out of pocket. In the class action lawsuit, there are many stories of people going without the care they need and dying shortly thereafter.

Today, the parent company UnitedHealth Group is valued at $560 billion. UnitedHealth Care made $281 billion in revenue in 2023. The outstanding amount of medical debt in the United States is $220 billion. Medical debt is in fact the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States.

The American Journal of Public Health found that 66% of bankruptcies in the United States were due to medical problems. I should note here that we do have resources for anyone struggling with medical debt, and I've linked those in the show notes. The fact that claim denials are so common makes this a blatant socioeconomic inequality issue.

If it costs more money to heal, to get care, to live, wealthier Americans can live longer, healthier lives than poor Americans.

Yeah. Yeah. I thought one of the really interesting things that you said about that, but also how people are seeing it the same way from both sides of the aisle is everyone's pointing at this and saying social decay is but the origin they're sort of pointing at different places. Like some people are pointing at the killing itself.

Some people are pointing at all of the comments online that seemed heartless. And some people are pointing upstream and talking more about the structural violence that has happened long before.

Acknowledging this head-on pushes the conversation back into the feedback loop of criticism. But again, I think it's perfectly acceptable in this complicated time we're living in to feel the weight of Bretton Johnson's death and the weight of the harm people have endured through not having access to affordable health care.

So that's what people are feeling right now. And it's notably been across the aisle.

Yeah. Yeah. During COVID, I watched TV shows that got really hyped up that I had missed, like Game of Thrones and I watched Breaking Bad. I had sort of missed the train on that by many years, but I had heard of it and I knew so many people were big fans. And what was so shocking to me at first was that people just sort of accepted the premise.

that somebody got a terminal illness and had to cook meth in order to provide for his own healthcare costs. It's crazy. If the show were to take place in Canada, it would have been a very boring show. It would have been one episode and he would have got chemo and it would have been fine.

So because this outrage does seem to be across the aisle, can we expect a solution from the government to fix the broken healthcare system?

And lastly, can we expect a solution from the healthcare industry and UnitedHealthcare itself? I'll leave you with an excerpt from Gia's piece.

Hi, Money Rehabbers. It's Morgan Levoy, the EP of the show. And this week, I'm going to be guest hosting Money Rehab. I've been producing Money Rehab with Nicole since it launched in 2021. I remember so clearly the first time I ever met Nicole, it was over Zoom because, you know, it was 2021 and everything was over Zoom. It might have even been 2020.

And Nicole had booked an Airbnb to write, honestly, I forget which book at that point. It might have been Miss Independent. And she was in the middle of the desert somewhere. And so we were on this call talking about what the show might look like. And every so often there would just be this screeching noise in the background because where Nicole was, there was a large population of wild hogs.

And so every so often she would flip her camera around and you would just see this small stampede of very scary looking wild creatures. And I just remember thinking, I love this woman and I can't wait to work with her. And at the time I was at iHeartRadio also producing other shows like Bethany Frankel's podcast and Bill Clinton's podcast, Minnie Driver's podcast and a bunch of others.