30 Days of US Healthcare: United Healthcare For All

Day 20

30 Days of US Healthcare

[olenickel]

Physician owned hospitals? Outlawed. Insurance owned hospitals? Perfectly legal. Legislators saw nothing wrong with this.

[Maree_CK]

I don’t know if I can stomach another week of learning about American health care.

[clarenceonyekwere]

These videos will get watched a lot this week

[cyberrb]

And at that point, a sane policymaker would say "either you dissolve like a sugar cube into many competitors, or you are under our control and become our public healthcare at rates set by us, either paid by the citizen or by the administration". But it's the US.

[rebekahg]

Every time you bring up Optum, I get so angry- because of how true it is.

My nana was trapped under Optum and they wouldn't cooperate with me at all. I was her sole caretaker for thirteen dang years and they'd ignore anything I said and would come up with any other alternative than what was obviously the problem. Literally, anything and everything. When the Optum doctors finally admitted to the things we'd been insisting for literally years, it was too late. The problem? Dementia.

She passed away in April. I'm still angry, and grieving. The family's trying to make legal things happen but they keep getting stopped.

[BabyBird]

I've been in practice for 21 years as an intermal medicine doc. Large hospitals systems and insurance companies are cancelling the contracts of independent physician groups and offering us contracts as employed physicians for more shifts and less pay. It's become "the American way"...more and more money is being diverted to executive suite salaries and bonuses, and away from patients and medical providers.

[silversleeper]

It’s always so much fun telling patients who just had an in network hearing test that their UHC hearing aid benefits aren’t in network because they go through a third party program, but also that third party is still owned by UHC, but because I don’t work for “UHC Hearing Professionals”, they’ve decided they won’t pay me 🙃

[mazzymoo]

As a Brit, hearing insurance jargon in the same sentence as healthcare just blows my brain.

[ritamariekelley]

THANK YOU, DOCTOR GLOCKENFLECKEN! You're a National treasure.

[Brineytoes]

I see articles in the journals all the time about nurse and physician burnout. I have yet to see anything about the lack of ethics in this practice. Doc Glauc, you are the only one who has seen what’s happening and showing the world how odious it really is. Few people understand what a code of ethics even is wen it comes to business practices. Professional medical dilemmas are something else altogether. People need to learn what CONFLICT OF INTEREST IS. You are describing it to a T. Thank you.

[Tactical_Turtwig]

I really sympathize with how disenchanted Jimothy increasingly becomes at every time UHC is happy or I don't even work in the medical field.

[clems_first]

This is turning more and more into a dystopian story. Wait

[orderfirst]

33 years medical office: claims and authorizations. I have worked with UHC and Optum for the past 10 years. Providers hate it. 2024 Optum takes over the Everett Clinic and the Polyclinic. I worked for Providence. I am a patient at EC. Their medical support staff has no idea how to get authorizations for services from Optum or UHC. I have to call and get the authorizations myself to make sure that my provider gets paid and the bill doesn't get passed on to me, because even though the provider is not supposed to bill me for making the mistake of not getting the prior authorization, I will still get billed. Yeah, insurance in the USA.

[Tser]

This series is honestly such an important documentary.

[KeeliaSilvis]

I love that Jimothy has learned to immediately react with "oh man ☹️😩" when there is "great news" from United.

[The_Egg]

Okay, genuine question. How the hell is UnitedHealth Group not a monopoly under the Sherman Antitrust Act. This is a prime example of vertical integration. I just looked it up, and there was a recent (October 2022) ruling that allowed UHG to acquire Change Healthcare, which is a healthcare data/claim system.

Edit: The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 only really affects horizontal integration (buying up competitors). What I'm really referring to is the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, which addresses vertical integration anti-competitive mergers.

[MSte]

Holy shit, that ending was absolutely chilling.

Government-operated healthcare for all = Bad, but I guess Private Equity-owned healthcare for all = Good. Oh America.

[morganellius]

This is the work of a patriot. Thank you for shining a focused light on this kafakaesque hell, that we call US healthcare.

[jeanlanz]

Thank you for regularly exposing the grotesque aspects of American healthcare. You make it likely to bring about change. God bless you!

[kellisnow]

"Optum Eats: half the salt and twice the red tape."
Thank you for that line 😂