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Mixing and matching revenue and profit. UnitedHealth care revenue but profit of UHG.
UHG revenue 370. UHG profit $22b.
UHC revenue $280b. UHC profit? Who knows.
UnitedHealth CEO Murdered
Started by southerndoc
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UHG revenue 370. UHG profit $22b.
UHC revenue $280b. UHC profit? Who knows.
To be his age and shape and get that fusion surgery he had...I have questions
This has been brought up in the pain forum before this case and now. It's interesting how spinal cord stimulator trial procedures require a psych eval beforehand but not spine fusion surgery.
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I wonder if this changes peoples view of this guy.
I havent heard different but perhaps some other surgery / procedure was turned down by UNited so he had this surgery and it doesnt go well and this is the answer.
I’ll say 95% of patients would shoot the doc rather than the insurance person. Something to be mindful of with the handful of docs getting murdered by patients. In EM there is no shortage of patients who leave unhappy / dissatisfied. If you haven’t already done so.. i recommend you read the google reviews of your ED that you work at. Plenty of pissed off people.. Often those reviews will name the doc.. Something to be mindful of and worried about.
I havent heard different but perhaps some other surgery / procedure was turned down by UNited so he had this surgery and it doesnt go well and this is the answer.
I’ll say 95% of patients would shoot the doc rather than the insurance person. Something to be mindful of with the handful of docs getting murdered by patients. In EM there is no shortage of patients who leave unhappy / dissatisfied. If you haven’t already done so.. i recommend you read the google reviews of your ED that you work at. Plenty of pissed off people.. Often those reviews will name the doc.. Something to be mindful of and worried about.
Sure but that's nothing new. Looks like the insurance industry finally gets to see what doctors have to deal with on the daily.
The amount of news this generated is 10x more than all the docs who get murdered. They value these people more than physicians.
I suspect the insurance industry will simply be more careful than actually care. Docs just go on and see the next patient.
I have been in EDs where patients have threatened to bomb us.
Just today the hospital I was at had an agitated patient/family member and there was concern they brought a gun into the hospital. Crazy things happen. A local hospital had a patient go into the bathroom and commit suicide. Craziest part was he was a local pastor (I think) and was charged with sexual abuse of a minor or something similar. We work in a dangerous environment. Our computers barely work, the chairs we sit in are in disrepair etc. I cant think of another career where someone earns as much as we do and works in such a craptastic environment.
I also recently discovered that my home address is available on whitepages.com not sure how to even get that info hidden at this point.
Apparently the post office will sell your address, lol
How The Post Office Sells Your Address Update To Anyone Who Pays (And The Little-Known Loophole To Opt Out)
(AP Photo/Murray Ledger & Times, John Wright) Have you ever wondered how junk mail follows you so easily when you move to a new address? How do credit card companies, catalogs, charities seeking money and everyone else all know when you have moved across town or across the country entirely...
www.forbes.com
To pushback a little, if knowing that people get angry keeps you from being a belligerent jerk than being mindful of that can be useful. Otherwise, practice medicine in the best interests of the patient. EM docs getting killed by upset patients absolutely is a thing, but it's a thing in the same sense as heterotopic pregnancies in the absence of IVF. You're far more likely to get in trouble (personally and professionally) giving out opioids,benzos, etc to someone to whom you caved the first or second time and then cut off then to just apologetically "gray rock" them the first time and let them move onto someone else.
YES. I used to work with someone who took his own chair to each shift because the ones provided were falling apart. And in the patients' rooms, we're told to sit while talking to them, but the only place to sit is the lid of the trash can. I always thought I was a spoiled brat for thinking about these things (We're saving lives here, man! Who cares if there's a chair to sit in?!), but it's true... no other professional deals with this.
Actually happened to me:
[CEO walks around ER to do the perfunctory "looking like he knows or cares about what's going on at all" thing as he does every so often.]
Him: "What do you guys need around here that would make it just a little bit better for you on shift?"
Me: "Honestly? A proper chair or two. This one is held together by duct tape. I'm about to take this one home and weld it back together."
He looked at me like I had two heads before saying something about how it needed to come from some other budget and how it was someone else's problem to address.
Me, to my director: "No chairs, huh? There's a LOT of really cool chairs in the boardroom. Let's just go take some of those."
Pay for incogni.I also recently discovered that my home address is available on whitepages.com not sure how to even get that info hidden at this point.
Apparently the post office will sell your address, lol
How The Post Office Sells Your Address Update To Anyone Who Pays (And The Little-Known Loophole To Opt Out)
(AP Photo/Murray Ledger & Times, John Wright) Have you ever wondered how junk mail follows you so easily when you move to a new address? How do credit card companies, catalogs, charities seeking money and everyone else all know when you have moved across town or across the country entirely...
They request all data brokers to remove your info.
I don't know how effective it is but me and my wife have been removed from probably 100 data brokers.
Surgeon: Do you have a room with a bed so I can do an exam?
Me: (only because I've known the surgeon for a long time) Pre-op has beds.
I also recently discovered that my home address is available on whitepages.com not sure how to even get that info hidden at this point.
Apparently the post office will sell your address, lol
How The Post Office Sells Your Address Update To Anyone Who Pays (And The Little-Known Loophole To Opt Out)
(AP Photo/Murray Ledger & Times, John Wright) Have you ever wondered how junk mail follows you so easily when you move to a new address? How do credit card companies, catalogs, charities seeking money and everyone else all know when you have moved across town or across the country entirely...
If you're reluctant to pay for a service, you might try DocDefender through Doximity. Found my info on a whole lotta sites and they take care of the removal. Free if you have a doximity account.
I disagree here. I am a very light Opiate Rxer. That being said, it can be the frustrated patient who “demands” an MRI. It could be perhaps around me but there are plenty more docs who rx people opiates or long term benzos for anxiety than the ones i see getting caught.
Incredibly few docs get in trouble for benzo or opiate Rxs. It is 100x easier to just give them 12 Percocet than deal with the headache of a patient who wants them and you dont want to give it to them.
Im not referring to pill mills, im talking regular ED patients. Long time ago I moonlit at a very small rural ED. 10 patients a day. Had a patient check in that the nurses knew. They said this patient would look at the parking lot and check in based on the car that was there. She knew some of the docs would give this person opiates and others wouldnt. I didnt but a bunch of the other docs there did apparently. This isnt a patient who was prone to violence but thats just the next step.
I refuse to AIDET.. I literally never sit in a patients room unless im there to break bad news, death of someone, new cancer, miscarriage etc. Literally I never sit. Half the rooms have nowhere to sit, the other half are cramped. I dont care. I listen to the patients my pt satisfaction scores are decent enough. Our sites I work at do well with this. Reality is the scores matter more based on Waiting time, turn around time etc.
Screw AIDEt. When they care about what i want / need I’ll care about their desires.
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I pay for Incogni, Aura, Abine DeleteMe, Optery and have the free DocDefender. There are a few remnants of me on the internet, but it requires some effort. It took maybe a full year before a large portion of it was deleted and a good 2 years before the vast majority of it was deleted.
That depends on how you define chronic pain patients. Young people with significant psych comorbidities? Yeah, true. Well, true they don't need me. A psychiatrist would probably help.
Middle age people with potentially reversible pain generators? I tell everyone in this subset when I do an epidural or MBB or whatever... "This isn't going to fix you. This is going to make the pain tolerable enough for you to <go do PT/lose weight/whatever> which is what is actually going to have a chance at fixing this in the long run. This is also the group that can classically get Fed (besides the borderline patients above). Some surgeon will offer to fuse them or some pain doc will suggest an SCS they don't need and make wild promises about how it will fix them.
The little old lady with a spine that predates WW2 who just wants an injection every few months to manage her pain better in her twilight years? She is 100% better off in my clinic. She is under no illusions that she's going to get better. I also don't feel bad about poking her every few months to make her life more tolerable.
Most large healthcare companies have a person whose job it is to make sure the tools you have are ergonomically. Chairs are one thing i can get.
Granted there has been a basically nonfunctioning computer for the past year, and 20% of the keyboards have keys that don’t work, and the ascom type phones the ER docs use have been flittering between kinda works and not working. . . . . .
spend more time in the ED.. nothing works.. not the printers, not the phones, not the computers, not e scribing and definitely not the chairs.
Do these others provide much above and beyond igcogni?
Also curious on this and if you only wanted one which way to go.
New York's 100-year concealed carry gun ban was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022 in a 6-3 decision.
Yes?
- ban or no ban, restrictions or no restrictions... these events are going to occur unless there's altogether greater change... liiike, I don't know... NOT running a company that kills people "indirectly" and screws their policyholders out of Billions...
Treating people honestly and fairly is a good way to not be gunned down on the way to a shareholder meeting where you discuss how much money you've stolen this quarter while the poors have their care denied.
Telling lawful people they can't have guns does nothing.
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This guys gun was 3d printed so I highly doubt he registered it as a homemade weapon. So gun control wouldn't have made a difference.
It is a scary thought that so many people on TikTok and the interwebs think it's fine that just because someone ran a business in a way they didn't like means it's fine to murder him. Sure, the company doesn't act in the patient's best interest and it is profit driven, but still... killing the guy? Idk it's just a long stretch for me to get behind murder. Pretty much every hospital system I've ever been in probably has cause patients' deaths due to trying to gain profit through cutting costs.
Any one of us could get called "evil" by some of the family members of muggles who say we didn't do what they think needed done...and then come after us.
It is a scary thought that so many people on TikTok and the interwebs think it's fine that just because someone ran a business in a way they didn't like means it's fine to murder him. Sure, the company doesn't act in the patient's best interest and it is profit driven, but still... killing the guy? Idk it's just a long stretch for me to get behind murder. Pretty much every hospital system I've ever been in probably has cause patients' deaths due to trying to gain profit through cutting costs.
Any one of us could get called "evil" by some of the family members of muggles who say we didn't do what they think needed done...and then come after us.
Collegially: "Bro."
United does far more than run a business in the way they don't like.
They're literally profiting from suffering via labyrinthine contracts, exclusions, exceptions, and change the game every year to steal more.
It may be a polite looking "game of death" but it's still a game of death that only they can win..
That's like $30 a month. I don't even spend that on streaming. Not too worried though. I googled myself for the first time and the first things you find is some baseball player with the same name. And a guy who ran a multimillion dollar ponzi scheme(No, I'm not named Bernie Madoff) About 5 or 6 google pages in you start finding me but its all hospitals I've worked at or old office locations for the CMG or USNews,Healthgrades, Doximity etc. Add MD to the search and that stuff all pops to the top but its still 3 or 4 pages down before a residential address pops up. An apartment I lived in on Long Island almost 30 years ago when I wasn't even an MD. I opted out of a bunch of people search engines on my own by telling them I had a stalker. So not much to find there. If someone really wants to find me they can. My name is attached to my house in the county records and I have no doubt it's out there in countless other ways but to the casual google stalker it's going to be a tough go. Also, I live in a cabin with a mean dog at the end of a dirt road that would break many vehicles.
I"m more worried about someone just waiting for me to get off work and leave the hospital. That has happened once or twice. One of them called me "a little f*gg*t" to which I said "Who you calling little" I'm not little. He ran away.
But, look at that, in 25 years I've accumulated 1 google review, 1 healthgrades review, and 3 Vitals reviews. All 5 stars😛
Funny. The rest of the developed world don't have that problem.
Similar to universal healthcare. They have universal healthcare and don't need to kill their CEOs.
US has bad guns laws and bad healthcare system.
But hey, let's keep doing the same thing.
My reviews, last checked 15 years ago, kinda suck. I'm not worried.
The thing is they are mostly within the law. Change the rules. Would we kill the head of Budweiser. Their product kills people. The make a ton of money. Same with tobacco companies. I hate.. hate United.. but yeah im not cool with murder.
They're also not very happy about either of those things. They may have universal healthcare, but many of them want to shoot their politicians for their orwellian acts.
I'll keep my guns and my concealed carry laws.
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Nah.
You can have the choice of Budweiser or no Budweiser. You can have the choice of Marlboro or no Marlboro.
For many, it's "My job gets me United, which in turn gets me nothing. I have a family and no choice nor recourse."
And just like drinking in moderation; maybe United could deny claims in moderation instead of turbo aggressively.
It should probably be in their executive health plan to do so... might translate to longevity.
I’m not saying I disagree with you because I don’t actually know what my opinion is on this extremely complicated topic, but how would you propose the American people go about changing the rules? These companies and so large and powerful that they pretty much write the rules…
I would argue the American people did attempt to vote for an overhaul of the healthcare system back in 2008 and what they got for their trouble was a 900 page “you have to pass it so you can find out what’s in it, it’s gonna be great” healthcare bill that was written by industry lobbyists.
Another attempt to nominate a candidate that might have supported further overhauls in 2016 - whether one agrees with Bernie’s ideas being good or terrible - was pretty clearly quashed by the political machine in favor of a more pro-corporate candidate.
They didnt vote enough for that. Bernie had no chance. We all also know most people arent 1 issue voters. Yes the lobbyists have all the power but as you mentioned you can change the rules of the game. The issue is real and i didnt say it was simple to fix but murdering someone who is obeying the rules is insane.
In most jobs these days you have a choice. My tiny group has a few insurance options. At this point you can do health shares and a bunch of other options.
No doubt Obamacare was a disaster every which way. Premiums continued to go up, insurers maximized profits and vertically integrated meanwhile doctors sat on the sidelines and were pushed out.
imagine if a chef couldnt own a restaurant. Stupid on steroids.
Imagine if everyone who didnt like the rules put forth in society but federal or state legislatures just went out and murdered people. I dont like Brown V Board of education so im gonna murder someone related to it.
I dont know the Dobbs decision so I am gonna go bomb churches. Etc etc.
This dude was doing the will of the board of directors. Keep in mind it’s not even his money he is rationing. Trying to lay the blame on a single individual is stupid. Murdering some dude is just not a reasonable behavior. This isnt a 3rd world country and i hope we dont devolve into that.
The difference between traitor and patriot is merely the side that wins.
You know this is kind of how we became a nation, right?
I'll bet none of the BOD ever had a claim denied.
I'll bet all of them got whatever they wanted immediately.
I'll bet Pelosi's hip surgery didn't need prior auth; nor any of her elite friends' needs.
"Rules for thee, but not for me."
When I did internal locums for Team Health, one could easily sus out a job just by looking at the physician seating. I thought of it as a chair index.
Most places had terrible desks, poor computers and keyboards, and terrible chairs. Meanwhile some obese administrative type that I had to inferface with on onboarding had ergonomic everything, two monitors, a nice office, etc.
The core of medicine in America is admin, everything else is ancillary. Look at who always works for the hospital versus who is often outsourced...
Always works for the system: admin.
Sometimes outsourced: everyone else (doctors, PAs, NPs, nurses, billing, etc.).
I'm waiting for someone to open a facility that totally isn't a hospital, but only takes paying "patients" to be cared for by physicians (only) with qualified nurses staffing the hospital. It'll sidestep EMTALA, HIPAA, liability, and CONs and absolutely not be a hospital but completely crush the current system.
Boeing used to be a company of engineers that made great planes and happened to also make money. They are now a lousy company run by MBAs and they make terrible airplanes.
Hospitals used to be run by doctors and they provided good healthcare and also happened to make money. We now have the same terrible result as Boeing. Terrible medical care, short term profits and a long term disaster.
"Rules for thee, but not for me."
Indeed.. that being said it’s apples and oranges.. we can hope they force the breakup of the PBMs. Step 1 of what needs to happen.
Again I'm not saying murder is justified. I'm just saying that when I look at the overwhelming "sentiment" to this event and try to understand it, these are the questions I am finding myself coming up with.
I don't really think your examples fall into the same category to be honest. Brown v board of education was so long ago that I don't think we can really examine it for comparison purposes in 2024 - I'm a practicing physician and I'm not even sure if my parents were born when that decision occurred. Perhaps back then it was an extremely unpopular ruling but I would bet there was a more divided sentiment back then on the issue. While Dobbs is super controversial I think that the nation is way more divided on that topic than they are when it comes to Health insurances. Health insurance companies are extremely unpopular across the entire country amongst people on both "sides" of the political spectrum, and I see the response to this CEO's murder largely reflecting a widespread belief that the supposed traditional ways of "changing the rules" have failed and people are fed up with it.
It exists in many ways.. ASCs are the most obvious example. It’s not all sunshine and daisies.. Steward health owned by a doc..
While I agree. The left and right hate insurance the point is it only takes 1 but job to take matters into his own hands. This has opened up some good conversations but the bloodlust by docs is worrisome. Thats my 2 cents.
Honestly, it’s mind boggling to me im defending the insurance companies. Im not a fan of United, Cigna, BCBS/Anthem/Elevance. It’s all quite the sham.
But again, should we murder big pharma for selling drugs at a stupid markup to Americans but they are super cheap elsewhere? There is no shortage of horrid behavior.
Near me, we have a bunch of HCA sites. I dont know if it is because they hire mental midgets as docs or there is something more systemic but they somehow manage to have all their self pay patients get discharged and the follow up always seems to fall through the cracks. HCA always manages to make money, they love all that is wrong in medicine. I wouldnt condone someone murdering their CEO.
Honestly I imagine you would see similar sentiment if something happened to the HCA CEO.
The Pfizer CEO would be interesting because you could at least argue Pfizer does provide some net benefit for society at large (COVID vaccine especially) even if they do take advantage of the American people via regulatory capture.
I'm not sure you can really argue the activities of HCA or UHC have really been a net benefit for society at least over the past decade.
I think many of us on here would agree that some degree of rationing care makes sense. Popping a 50k pacemaker into a 98 year old seems crazy. Spending a ton of money on meds on a patient who isnt gonna do well is a waste of time, money and resources.
I dont agree with UHC but 1) pre auth is allowed. 2) much of the cost is hospital bloat and same for pharma ad they have to make it up. That requires more money from the insurers.
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I’m not even talking about prior auth delays, which in my experience nobody denies a prior auth for chemo because a patient is 98 years old - crazy or not.
I’m thinking more along the lines of vertically integrating by becoming the #1 employer of physicians in the US (?World) and buying up PBMs then forcing people on your insurance plans to fill drugs only through your PBM specialty pharmacy even when it is a literal 10x-1000x more expensive option for the patient than the local clinic.
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Or utilizing AI for denials that is known to have a high error rate (although I will say the 90% rate often quoted is probably a big overestimation if I had to bet)
UnitedHealthcare’s AI Use to Deny Claims is Center of Industrywide Debate
More than a year ago, UnitedHealthcare Group Inc.’s murdered CEO had put into place an artificial intelligence (AI) system that automatically denied
www.hfsresearch.com
Again, all of this stuff is allowed because UHC/BCBS/etc. write the rules…
This went without saying. When I was writing my response I was ready for the RF retort. It's all in good faith here man. Can't have these conversations anywhere else. Maybe I'll learn something and change my opinion.
It's like when a family member of the hospital's "leadership" team is in the hospital... so they demand that the patient is kept in the ICU.
It's like, 'Dude... you're the director of telemetry... if the care is so bad you wouldn't put your family member on your unit... maybe you should do something to fix it.'
Right on. Like, forgive me for not being upset when this suit and his boardroom cronies have had ages to do the right thing and stop stealing billions by rigging and re-rigging the game at every opportunity while the people they have contracted with to pay for their care suffer and die and someone finally decides that they've had enough.
@HemeOncHopeful19 Right.. murdering a leader of a healthcare org isnt justifiable because those guys write the rules. In a democracy no matter how flawed we have a way to change it. Im not here saying they arent corrupt.. they totally are.. they are a horrid organization and their vertical integration is terrible. I am sure you saw how United pays sound physicians more than what they pay other docs. Just a way to shuffle money around.
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