When one wave of the wand can delay or deny our dreams, I guess it’s no surprise that many of us cheer as a Prince Charming appears to take our side.
“Even before police arrested Luigi Mangione in connection with the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, some on the internet were hailing him as a 21st-century Robin Hood,” Axios reported last week. And he apparently fits the part. Mangione is “by consensus, handsome, and jacked,” according to a New Yorker article.
More than forty years ago, Richard Meyer, a scholar of American folklore, wrote that “the American outlaw-hero is a ‘man of the people’; he is closely identified with the common people, and, as such, is generally seen to stand in opposition to certain established oppressive economic, civil and legal systems peculiar to the American historical experience,” the New Yorker article says.
UnitedHealthcare is the insurance arm of the world’s biggest health-care company. You and I have talked for years about the ways health insurance denials can upend people’s finances.
A Reuters article explains that the 2010 Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), set new baselines for who and what insurance plans must cover. As costs have gone up, insurers increasingly have turned to the prior authorization process, vetting requests for medical services before they agree to pay.
Prior authorizations were used 46 million times in 2022, up from 37 million in 2019, Reuters says, citing a KFF analysis of privately managed Medicare Advantage plans for people aged 65 and older or who are disabled. CVS denied 13 percent of such requests, UnitedHealthcare denied 8.7 percent, and Blue Cross Blue Shield denied 4.2 percent.
Only about 10 percent of patients appeal these denials, and of those challenges, about a third fail, KFF says. Among the reasons people don’t appeal are difficulties understanding the complexity of health coverage and being too sick, says KFF.
United Health’s coverage limits apply to a wide range of treatments. Just four days ago, a ProPublica headline read, “UnitedHealth is strategically limiting access to critical treatment for kids with autism.” And on Nov. 19, ProPublica headlined: “How UnitedHealth’s playbook for limiting mental health coverage puts countless Americans’ treatment at risk.”
Yesterday’s Morning Briefing from KFF Health News was headlined “CEO was aware of UnitedHealthcare’s PR problem before shooting.”
The Commonwealth Fund, an independent research organization, reported in August on ways Americans increasingly struggle to get their health insurance to work for them.
Also in August, the Commonwealth Fund published “Mirror, mirror 2024: A portrait of the failing U.S. health system,” comparing performance in 10 nations. The other countries are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
“The U.S. continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its health care sector,” the report says.
The United States is the only developed country without universal health care coverage (government-funded insurance).
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