United Healthcare CEO murder and our for-profit healthcare system.

We got what we voted for.

First of all, I totally understand people’s frustration with our dysfunctional health care system and the total frustration caused by insurance companies. “Delay and Deny” is real. When I started TRT, it was incredibly stressful getting insurance to pay (Realities of TRT and insurance). For every single 90 day prescription, they asked for full labs and documentation from my doctor. I had to nag my doctor 4x a year to provide this idiotic documentation on a treatment that is life-long. It was so stressful that I finally gave up and just starting paying out of pocket using GoodRX but most of America cannot afford to do this and it can be life threatening for them.

A large contingent of Americans celebrate Luigi Mangione for murdering the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson with the justification that his policies of “Delay and Deny” have killed thousands or patients from lack of care - 100% true. The next CEO of UnitedHealthcare will “delay and deny” just like Brian Thompson did, why? The board would fire the CEO if he didn’t! UnitedHealthcare is a publicly traded corporation and their responsibility is to their stockholders, not their patients. If the CEO is not maximizing stockholder value then the board will fire him and install someone else. This is the reality of “for-profit” healthcare.

Its OUR fault!

Its our fault because many of us hold stock in UnitedHealthcare. We are the ones forcing them to “delay and deny” for our gains. Take a look at your 401k funds and I can almost guarantee that you hold UNH stock individually or thru an S&P500 Index fund. We are the ones profiting from “delay and deny”.

Its also our fault because every time some reform of the American health care system comes up, people always scream: “America’s for-profit healthcare system is the best in the world!”. We have had many opportunities to vote for reforming our system but massive spending by corporate America’s physicians lobby (AMA), hospital lobby (AHA), and insurance lobby convince American to keep the status quo. Proposals to move away from the for-profit healthcare system are often labeled “socialist” or “communist”. This is the system we voted for and we are stuck with.

Moving Forward

Because of the enormous clout of the lobby groups representing doctors, hospitals, and health insurance companies as well as the political hatred toward “Obamacare”, converting to a Canadian style or German style healthcare system is never going to happen so we need to focus on making our for-profit privatized healthcare system work better. We *can* make our for-profit healthcare system work again and become the envy of the world but its going to industry regulation to prevent companies like UnitedHealthcare from getting away with having 3x the denial rate of other insurance companies. It will be a big challenge for the incoming Trump Administration to achieve two opposing goals: Deregulation and fixing healthcare.