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UnitedHealthcare

Unionizing United Healthcare

March 17, 2025 Benjamin Y. Fong, Portside. , , , ,
There were 122 National Labor Relations Board representation elections run in February 2025, and ten involved units of 250 or more eligible voters. Those ten elections, however, involved 74 percent of all eligible voters that month. The highest-profile election was the loss at the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Garner, North Carolina, which my colleague Jonathan Rosenblum covers well here. Jonathan and I offer some more in-depth thoughts on what recent news in the world of Amazon organizing means in a recent article in these pages, but in brief: it’s going to be very difficult to make much headway with this company with traditional site-by-site organizing methods.

Luigi Mangione Draws Crowd For First Court Hearing

February 23, 2025 Michael R. Sisak, AP News. , , , , ,
The defendant wore a bulletproof vest and shackles. A woman in the crowd wore a “Free Luigi” scarf. Outside, throngs of people cheered and chanted his name. So it went Friday at a court hearing for Luigi Mangione, the man accused of gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel on Dec. 4. Mangione, who has become something of a cause célèbre for people upset with the health insurance industry, made his first court appearance since his Dec. 23 arraignment on state murder and terror charges. Mangione, 26, didn’t speak at the hearing.

Doctor And Patients Protest UnitedHealth’s Record Earnings

January 23, 2025 Chris Mills Rodrigo, Inequality.org. , , , ,
America’s largest health care company, the UnitedHealth Group, pulled in over $100 billion in revenue in just the fourth quarter of 2024 alone. For the full year, the giant’s insurance division, UnitedHealthcare, reported record revenue of $298.2 billion, the company announced last Thursday. These staggering revenue totals actually fell below investor expectations. UnitedHealth Group shares, right after the announcement, slipped 6 percent on the New York Stock Exchange. Meanwhile, just outside that capitalist bastion, victims of our for-profit healthcare system — doctors and patients alike — were braving freezing temperatures to call out the suffering that engineered UnitedHealth’s exorbitant earnings.

Luigi Mangione And The Dangers Of Terrorism Charges

December 28, 2024 Schuyler Mitchell, Consortium News. , , ,
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg unveiled new charges on Dec. 17 against Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspected of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. While Mangione already faced second-degree murder and weapons charges, the unsealed indictment reveals an escalation: New York prosecutors have charged Mangione with first-degree murder “in furtherance of terrorism.” Bragg’s choice to invoke the big “T” word came as a surprise; it’s not often associated with a single, targeted killing. In fact, prosecutors are charging Mangione using a state law hatched after the 9/11 attacks “to combat the evils of terrorism.”

Is Public, Quality Healthcare Possible In The United States?

December 18, 2024 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. , , , , , ,
People in the US pay billions towards the health insurance industry, yet many in the healthcare field believe that this industry does little to ensure quality care to patients. While US healthcare spending is by far the highest of any country in the world, the country has the lowest life expectancy among other nations with a similar GDP. In recent weeks, the rage against the for-profit healthcare industry in the United States has intensified. The reality faced by many in the US, of avoiding seeking medical care in an emergency for fear of costs, or having health insurance claims repeatedly denied despite paying thousands to private insurers, has become too much to bear.

NYT Panics Over Outrage At Insurance Companies

December 18, 2024 Ari Paul, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. , , , , , ,
In the wake of the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the arrest of alleged shooter Luigi Mangione, I wrote (FAIR.org, 12/11/24) about how Murdoch outlets like the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, as well as Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post editorial board, not only decried the widespread support for Mangione but fought back against legitimate criticism of the health insurance industry. Now the New York Times is in full-scale panic mode over the widespread boiling anger against the health insurance industry the killing has laid bare.

‘It Had To Be Done’: Luigi Mangione Manifesto Revealed

December 12, 2024 Common Dreams. , , , , , , ,
A day after Luigi Mangione was arrested and charged as the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein on Tuesday published what he said was the 26-year-old's highly reported on manifesto. The existence of the handwritten document found on Mangione when he was taken into custody in Pennsylvania on Monday was confirmed by the New York Police Department, and major media outlets have quoted from it, but none had released it in full. "My queries to The New York Times, CNN, and ABC to explain their rationale for withholding the manifesto, while gladly quoting from it selectively, have not been answered," Klippenstein said on his Substack.

No Tears For Slain CEO: Compassion ‘Out Of Network’

December 11, 2024 Workers' World. , , ,
Normally when someone is shot dead, human beings feel sad for the victim. But in the case of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, killed before dawn on the streets of Manhattan on Dec. 4, a large majority of public comments are that empathy is “out of network.” For example, Anthony Zenkus, a lecturer at the Columbia School of Social Work, posted on X: “Today, we mourn the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down … wait, I’m sorry — today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.”

Chris Hedges: The Killing Of Brian Thompson

December 5, 2024 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , ,
We do not yet know the motive for the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. But it would not surprise me if the killer stalked Thompson because UnitedHealthcare had denied medical coverage, or forced a family or an individual into bankruptcy, after the company failed to cover a serious illness. Insurers reject about 1 in 7 claims for treatment, often by deciding the treatment is not “medically necessary.” Among 10 high-income nations, the United States spends the most on health care but has the worst health outcomes. Americans die four years earlier than their counterparts in other industrialized nations.

UnitedHealth’s Playbook For Limiting Coverage Puts Countless People At Risk

November 20, 2024 Annie Waldman, ProPublica. , , , , ,
For years, it was a mystery: Seemingly out of the blue, therapists would feel like they’d tripped some invisible wire and become a target of UnitedHealth Group. A company representative with the Orwellian title “care advocate” would call and grill them about why they’d seen a patient twice a week or weekly for six months. In case after case, United would refuse to cover care, leaving patients to pay out-of-pocket or go without it. The severity of their issues seemed not to matter. Around 2016, government officials began to pry open United’s black box.

How Medicare Advantage Care Denials Affect Patients

March 7, 2024 Matthew Cunningham-Cook , Portside. , , ,
In 2023, insurance behemoth UnitedHealth spent $8 billion buying back its stock to juice its stock price—and its executive compensation, which is tied to the company’s stock price. It spent 39% more on stock buybacks in 2023 than in 2022. In 2023, it also spent $6.7 billion on dividend payments—a 10% jump from the prior year. The company’s CEO, Sir Andrew Witty, pulled in nearly $21 million in 2022—a 13% hike from 2021. (His compensation for 2023 hasn’t been disclosed yet.) Also in 2023, UnitedHealth spent $10.76 million lobbying Congress.

UnitedHealthcare Has Been Denying ER Claims For Years

June 26, 2021 Andrew Perez, Daily Poster. , , ,
The man’s son had been vomiting, feeling nauseous, and experiencing bad heartburn for several weeks. The child’s pediatrician eventually made the call: It was time to take the boy to the ER. The father, who requested anonymity, wasn’t the sort of person who went to the emergency room on a whim. He was an internal medicine physician after all, so he tried to avoid ER visits as much as possible. But in late 2019, he listened to the boy’s doctor and took his son to the ER near where they lived in Florida, then took him a second time when he once again couldn’t hold down food. The decision ultimately seemed to make sense. Tests found the boy was suffering from a newly onset auto-immune disorder. But the family’s insurer, UnitedHealthcare, refused to pay the bills, which totaled $7,000...