Opinion: Anger explodes at health care CEOs

By Sam Pizzigati

Over 8,000 Americans die every day, many of them unnecessarily.

Why? Because the United States still doesn't have a national health care system that guarantees everyone adequate medical attention.

One particular American's death has driven that point home. On Dec. 4, a gunman murdered Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare's 50-year-old CEO. The bullet casings from the shooting read "deny," "defend," and "depose."

Those three words neatly sum up the gameplan America's giant insurers so relentlessly follow: deny the claim, defend the lawsuit, depose the patient.

Last year, United pulled down $281 billion in revenue, boosting annual profits 33 percent over 2021. Thompson himself pocketed $10.2 million in personal compensation. And Andrew Witty, CEO of the overall UnitedHealth operation, collected $23.5 million, making him the nation's highest-paid health insurance CEO.

All private insurers profit by denying help to sick people who need it. But UnitedHealth's operations have become especially rewarding thanks to the shadowy world of "Medicare Advantage," the program that gives America's senior citizens the option to contract out their Medicare to private health-service providers.

These private providers collect fixed fees from the federal government for each of the senior citizens they enroll. They profit when the cost of providing care to those seniors amounts to less than what the government pays them in fees. And that gives private providers an ongoing incentive to limit the care their patients receive.

No Medicare Advantage provider, the American Prospect's Maureen Tkacik points out, has done more than UnitedHealthcare when it comes to "simply denying claims for treatments and procedures it unilaterally deems unnecessary." Industry-wide, Medicare Advantage providers deny 16 percent of patient claims. UnitedHealthcare denied 32 percent last year.

The public's frustration with health insurance companies erupted bitterly after Thompson's murder. UnitedHealth's official Facebook report on Thompson's death quickly drew 35,000 responses using the "Haha" emote.

"Thoughts and deductibles to the family," read one reaction. "Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network."

"Compassion withheld," read another, "until documentation can be produced that determines the bullet holes were not a preexisting condition."

Some of the fiercest reactions to Thompson's death came from within the medical community.

"This is someone who has participated in social murder on a mass scale," a medical student wrote in one typical post.

"My patients died," a nurse spat out in another, "while those b—-s enjoyed 26 million dollars."

"If there's anything our fractured country seems to agree on," mused Bloomberg's Lisa Jarvis, "it's that the health care system is tragically broken, and the companies profiting from it are morally bankrupt."

"To most Americans," agreed the New Yorker's Jia Tolentino, "a company like UnitedHealth represents less the provision of medical care than an active obstacle to receiving it."

Among wealthier countries, Americans "die the youngest and experience the most avoidable deaths" despite spending almost twice as much on health care as others, a recent Commonwealth Fund Study found. And 25 percent of Americans, Gallup polling adds, have people in their family who have had to delay medical treatment for a serious illness because they couldn't afford it.

Thompson's murder won't change those stats. The system that enriched him lives on — and the incoming Trump administration figures to make that system even worse. The corporate-friendly Heritage Foundation, in its controversial Project 2025 blueprint for the second Trump term, is proposing that Medicare Advantage become the "default option" for all new Medicare enrollees.

That would "essentially privatize Medicare" and significantly raise the program's cost, warns analyst Heather Cox Richardson.

With Thompson's death, America's health care powers feel and fear the American public's anger now more than ever. The rest of us need to channel that anger toward ending this system that's failed America's health.

We need to remake health care into a vital public service — not a tool for profit.

Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, co-edits Inequality.org