CARTOON: Healthcare Mafioso Makes His Case!

A survey of oncologists in 2022 found that 42% of prior authorizations were delayed by more than one business day, and 14% of the delays had a serious adverse impact on the patient.

Cartoon by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink

By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (12/30/24)

Is Luigi Mangione a terrorist?

Is United HealthCare a terrorist organization every bit as deadly as one of the many Islamic extremist terror groups the CIA and State Department regularly organize, partner with and put in charge of places like Lybia and Syria?

Interesting questions, but check out the real reason the government may label Mangione a terrorist in the third item below.

In the second item below Thom Hartmann provides interesting history on the origins of the American corporate medical industrial complex (never call it ‘healthcare’). He includes a video of a speech Pres. Kennedy made in 1962 calling for universal health care. I had never seen this speech and found it stunning. It is safe to say in corporate-owned DC, there isn’t a single politician who could or would make such a speech. Sen. Sanders might mouth some of it, but would never really fight for it.

The JFK YouTube link below was posted nine years ago and only has 33,547 views and 261 comments. Given the topic, clearly, the YouTube algorithm has kept it suppressed. I urge you to include it in Substack posts you do and forward to friends and contacts. Get it out there, let it circulate.

Resist
Persist
Don’t be complicit

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CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION: United Healthcare WHISTLEBLOWER Reveals Fraud, Forced Claim Denials

Status Coup (12/29/24)

Jordan Chariton breaks down the UnitedHealthcare whistleblower who has come out to shed light on how barbaric the practices of the health insurance company are. From forced denial of claims, to a maximum allotted budget to use for claims, she exposes a lot that Jordan will break down.

20-minute video

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Why Can’t We Get The Bloodsucking Health Insurance Tick Off Our Back?

By Thom Hartmann
Common Dreams (12/28/24)

There’s only one person in this photograph of a recent G7 meeting who represents a country where an illness can destroy an entire family, leaving them bankrupt and homeless, with the repercussions of that sudden fall into poverty echoing down through generations.

Most Americans have no idea that the United States is quite literally the only country in the developed world that doesn’t define healthcare as an absolute right for all of its citizens. That’s it. We’re the only one left.

The United States spends more on “healthcare” than any other country in the world: about 17% of GDP.

Medicare For All, like Canada has, would save American families thousands every year immediately and do away with the 500,000+ annual bankruptcies in this country that happen only because somebody in the family got sick.

Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden, and Japan all average around 11%, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia all come in between 9.3% and 10.5%.

Health insurance premiums right now make up about 22% of all taxable payroll, whereas Medicare For All would run an estimated 10%.

We are literally the only developed country in the world with an entire multi-billion-dollar for-profit industry devoted to parasitically extracting money from us to then turn over to healthcare providers on our behalf. The for-profit health insurance industry has attached itself to us like a giant, bloodsucking tick.

And it’s not like we haven’t tried.

Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson all proposed and made an effort to bring a national healthcare system to the United States. Here’s one example really worth watching where President Kennedy is pushing a single-payer system (as opposed to Britain’s “socialist” model):

They all failed, and when I did a deep dive into the topic two years ago for my book The Hidden History of American Healthcare I found two major barriers to our removing that tick from our backs.

The early opposition, more than 100 years ago, to a national healthcare system came from Southern white congressmen (they were all men) and senators who didn’t want even the possibility that Black people could benefit, health-wise, from white people’s tax dollars. (This thinking apparently still motivates many white Southern politicians.)

The leader of that healthcare-opposition movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a German immigrant named Frederick Hoffman, as I mentioned in a recent newsletter. Hoffman was a senior executive for the Prudential Insurance Company, and wrote several books about the racial inferiority of Black people, a topic he traveled the country lecturing about.

His most well-known book was titled Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. It became a major best-seller across America when it was first published for the American Economic Association by the Macmillan Company in 1896, the same year the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision legally turned the entire U.S. into an apartheid state.

Hoffman taught that Black people, in the absence of slavery, were so physically and intellectually inferior to whites that if they were simply deprived of healthcare the entire race would die out in a few generations. Denying healthcare to Black people, he said, would solve the “race problem” in America.

Southern politicians quoted Hoffman at length, he was invited to speak before Congress, and was hailed as a pioneer in the field of “scientific racism.” Race Traits was one of the most influential books of its era.

By the 1920s, the insurance company he was a vice president of was moving from life insurance into the health insurance field, which brought an added incentive to lobby hard against any sort of a national healthcare plan.

The corporate tick clamps on

Which brings us to the second reason America has no national healthcare system: profits.

“Dollar” Bill McGuire, a recent CEO of America’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealth, made about $1.5 billion dollars during his time with that company. To avoid prosecution in 2007 he had to cough up $468 million, but still walked away a billionaire. Stephen J Hemsley, his successor, made off with around half a billion.

And that’s just one of multiple giant insurance companies feeding at the trough of your healthcare needs.

Much of that money, and the pay for the multiple senior executives at that and other insurance companies who make over $1 million a year, came from saying “No!” to people who file claims for payment of their healthcare costs.

This became so painful for Cigna Vice President Wendell Potter that he resigned in disgust after a teenager he knew was denied payment for a transplant and died. He then wrote a brilliant book about his experience in the industry: Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Healthcare and Deceiving Americans.

Companies offering such “primary” health insurance simply don’t exist (or are tiny) in almost every other developed country in the world. Mostly, where they do exist, they serve wealthier people looking for “extras” beyond the national system, like luxury hospital suites or air ambulances when overseas. (Switzerland is the outlier with exclusively private insurance, but it’s subsidized, mandatory, and nonprofit.)

If Americans don’t know this, they intuit it.

In the 2020 election there were quite a few issues on statewide ballots around the country. Only three of them outpolled President Joe Biden’s win, and expanding Medicaid to cover everybody was at the top of that list. (The other two were raising the minimum wage and legalizing pot.)

The last successful effort to provide government funded, single-payer healthcare insurance was when Lyndon Johnson passed Medicare and Medicaid (both single-payer systems) in the 1960s. It was a hell of an effort, but the health insurance industry was then a tiny fraction of its current size.

The government sold off

In 1978, when conservatives on the Supreme Court legalized corporations owning politicians with their Buckley v Belotti decision (written by Justice Louis Powell of “Powell Memo” fame), they made the entire process of replacing a profitable industry with government-funded programs like single-payer vastly more difficult, regardless of how much good they may do for the citizens of the nation.

The court then doubled-down on that decision in 2010, when the all-conservative vote on Citizens United cemented the power of billionaires and giant corporations to own politicians and even write and influence legislation and the legislative process.

Medicare For All, like Canada has, would save American families thousands every year immediately and do away with the 500,000+ annual bankruptcies in this country that happen only because somebody in the family got sick. But it would kill the billions every week in profits of the half-dozen corporate giants that dominate the health insurance industry.

This won’t be happening with a billionaire in the White House, but if we want to bring America into the 21st century with the next administration, we need to begin working, planning, and waking up voters now.

It’ll be a big lift: Keep it on your radar and pass it along.

Common Dreams work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Link to story

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WHY THEY ARE CHARGING ‘TERRORISM’: Luigi Mangione Prosecution Is Corrupted By Healthcare Industry!

The Jimmy Dore Show (12/29/24)

12-minute video

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Nearly 7 In 10 Americans Say Insurers' Greed Played Role In UnitedHealthcare CEO Killing

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last year found that 22% of cancer patients did not receive treatment their doctors had prescribed because of denials or prior authorization requirements.

By Julia Conley
Common Dreams (12/28/24)

In the wake of the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in early December, some political observers were taken aback by the public response to the event, which included morbid humor and expressions of "Schadenfreude," in the words of one woman who had battled an insurance company to secure treatment for her mother's cancer.

But according to a new poll released by NORC at the University of Chicago Friday night, the belief that the for-profit health insurance industry's business practices were largely to blame for the apparent targeted killing of Thompson is far from a fringe viewpoint.

Sixty-nine percent of respondents placed a "great deal or moderate amount" of blame on healthcare coverage denials by insurance companies like UnitedHealthcare, for Thompson's killing.

Sixty-seven percent said exorbitant profits made by health insurers were to blame.

Suffering for their profits

UnitedHealthcare, which reported $16 billion in profits last year, has garnered outrage for its claims denial practices. A Senate investigation earlier this year found the company was one of three that were intentionally denying claims made by nursing home patients who had Medicare Advantage plans and had suffered falls and strokes, in order to increase profits.

The company is also facing a class-action lawsuit over its use of algorithms to deny care.

Last year, a Commonwealth Fund survey found the 17% of Americans had been told by an insurance company that a medical claim was denied, and the poll suggested many patients and doctors feel powerless to stop companies like United from denying them care; more than half said they and their physicians did not challenge the insurers' decision.

That poll matched the results of the NORC survey released on Friday, in which 15% of respondents said they had had a claim denied.

Cancer of capitalism

The poll was released the same day that NBC News published an investigation showing that cancer patients are disproportionately affected by claim denials and insurers' requirements that they obtain "prior authorization" in order to receive life-saving care, an arduous process that can delay treatment and allow their condition to worsen.

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last year found that 22% of cancer patients did not receive treatment their doctors had prescribed because of denials or prior authorization requirements.

A survey of oncologists in 2022 found that 42% of prior authorizations were delayed by more than one business day, and 14% of the delays had a serious adverse impact on the patient.

The patients experienced "disease progression" 80% of the time and "loss of life" 36% of the time.

Insurers are increasingly relying on prior authorizations to delay or deny care for cancer patients, a 2023 study found. The number of nonspecialty oncology drugs that required prior authorization rose from 16% in 2010 to 78% in 2020.

NBC News told the story of one patient, Tracy Pike, who died after Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois declined to cover a $40,000 treatment for Stage 4 stomach cancer—surgery and intensive chemotherapy—that had been recommended by his doctor.

Citing the findings of a company doctor—who was an obstetrician-gynecologist, not an oncologist—Blue Cross ruled the treatment was "experimental, investigational, and unproven," even though it is routinely prescribed for cancer patients.

Media contempt for you

Journalist Ken Klippenstein noted that the NORC poll included a nuance that was "sorely lacking in major media coverage" after Thompson's death, which at times suggested that people who acknowledged the insurance industry's deadly practices were "supporting" the fatal shooting.

The poll found that 78% of people believed the person who shot Thompson outside a hotel in Manhattan bore "a great deal" or a "moderate amount" of blame for the killing.

"Now compare that with the tsunami of corporate media op-eds and pundits expressing the sparkling insight that murder is wrong," wrote Klippenstein. "Yeah, we know. Episodes like these really show you how much contempt these elite media organs have for the public, which they apparently see as helpless children in need of a preschool level moral lesson."

"As the NORC poll shows, the vast majority of people know that, yes, of course murder is wrong—they just also happen to think there's more to the story than that," he continued. "And they're right: How can you have an honest discussion about any of this without addressing the Moloch-like industry that profits from denying people healthcare?"

But as Klippenstein wrote on Thursday, those who took part in that "honest discussion" in the days after Thompson's killing were branded as "extremists" not just by the media, but by law enforcement.

Days after the killing, Klippenstein wrote, the New York Police Department circulated an intelligence report on the suspected gunman, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione—but the report also included warnings about "ordinary people" who expressed sympathy for Mangione online.

"Warning of 'a wide range of extremists' that 'may view Mangione as a martyr,' the report's title singles out 'disdain for corporate greed," wrote Klippenstein, noting that the document was circulated to law enforcement and counterterrorism agencies nationally.

But as the latest polling shows, he wrote, "believing the health insurance industry is at least partly responsible for the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO is not some fringe position."

Link to story

“UnitedHealthcare, which reported $16 billion in profits last year, has garnered outrage for its claims denial practices. A Senate investigation earlier this year found the company was one of three that were intentionally denying claims made by nursing home patients who had Medicare Advantage plans and had suffered falls and strokes, in order to increase profits.”