Delay & Deny

 

 JEFFREY ST. CLAIR>>

“Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers. If you take a breath or think about any of these cases, you’re going to fall behind.”

–  Dr. Debby Day, former Cigna medical director

It appears that the killer of Brian Thompson left his manifesto etched on the spent casings of the bullets used to gun down the CEO of UnitedHealthcare outside the Midtown Hilton just down the block from Rockefeller Center: “Delay” and “Deny.” Those two chill words might also serve as the unofficial motto of the $500 billion health industry giant, whose investors Thompson was preparing to address.

Thompson, a 20-year veteran of the Minneapolis-based conglomerate, became CEO of UnitedHealthcare in 2021. In his three years at the helm, Thompson oversaw the rise of the corporation’s profits from $12 billion the year before he took over to more than $16 billion in 2023. He was lavishly rewarded for his services, pocketing more than $10.2 million in total compensation. The only cloud on the horizon was a pending Justice Department investigation of the company’s monopolistic practices. Indeed, some of the investors awaiting Thompson’s address at the Hilton may not have been so adoring of his sparkling corporate achievements. In May, Thompson was sued by a firefighters’ pension fund in March for insider trading. The suit charges that the CEO sold $15 million in company stock while failing to disclose the federal investigation into the company, which only became public after a Wall Street Journal article appeared on February 27, 2024, five months after Thompson became aware of the probe.

How those profits were generated is another story. Brian Thompson wasn’t a healthcare professional turned corporate titan. He was an accountant who’d learned the tricks of his trade at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Among the profit-enhancing schemes Thompson brought to UnitedHealth Care was a new method of cashing in on the privatization of Medicare by habitually denying claims to seniors who’d bought into the Medicare Advantage scam.

To pick just one example of this ruthless strategy, under Thompson’s tenure, UnitedHealth increased its denial rate of claims for post-acute care made by seniors who had suffered debilitating falls or strokes from 10.7 percent the year before he took over to more than 22.7 only a year later, when this shameful practice came under the scrutiny of a Senate committee. The same investigation found that UnitedHealthcare increased its denial rate for skilled nursing facilities by nine times from 2019 to 2022.

While Thompson was an executive at the company, UnitedHealthcare used an AI system to automate the denial of medical services. The program had a 90% error rate, resulting in thousands of people being denied medically necessary and fully covered treatments.

The Senate Committee report briefly made headlines, but it didn’t do much lasting damage to UnitedHealthcare or change its mode of profiteering through the systematic denial of claims. Instead, it left families suffocating under mounds of medical debt or bankrupted by bills they thought they’d bought insurance to cover. That’s mainly because one of UnitedHealthcare’s most significant corporate acquisitions has been the US Congress. Since 1990, UnitedHealth has made $34.4 million in political donations and invested more than $100,260,000 in lobbying since 1998.

It’s a depraved business model and you can understand how someone might have snapped and gone looking for revenge. Thompson’s wife, Paulette, said that the CEO had received threats: “There had been some threats. Basically, I don’t know, a lack of coverage? I just know that he said there were some people that had been threatening him.” So that leaves about 20 million suspects…

COUNTERPUNCH