From the New York Times this morning:
This is pretty disturbing. Are we really at the point in our Trumpesque anti-establishment fervor that we celebrate the deliberate murder of corporate executives we dislike? The story continues with this:
The dark commentary after the death of Mr. Thompson, a 50-year-old insurance executive from Maple Grove, Minn., who was also a husband and a father of two children, highlighted the anger and frustration over the state of health care in America, where those with private insurance often find themselves in Kafka-esque tangles while seeking reimbursement for medical treatment and are often denied.
Now I'm curious. It's certainly true that insurance companies deny a lot of claims, but that's always been true. Or has it? Here are the results of Experian's latest survey of providers (i.e., doctors):
"Claim denials are increasing" is way up from 2022. I can't find any long-term data about this, but perhaps claim denial and Kafka-esque tangles with insurers really are up a lot over the past decade. Health insurers are certainly performing well for some reason—even better than the red-hot S&P 500:
Politically, the big reason liberals have never been able to sell universal health care is that people are satisfied with their insurance and don't want the government to take it away. And obviously this is all a moot point for the next four years. But after that, if insurers keep getting greedier and greedier, I wonder if the tide has finally turned?
T.R. Reid's book The Healing of America (2010) discusses the healthcare system in ten rich (like the U.S.) countries, and explains how everyone is covered while they spend half of what we spend. Or you could watch his speech plugging the book, which includes most of the salient info from the printed version. We're doing it wrong, and proud of it.
Coppola’s “The Rainmaker” (one of his best movies) dates to 1997, and we’re only now noticing that the insurance companies routinely kill people?
In 2014 Nick Hanauer wrote a piece warning that if the wealthy didn't start caring about wealth disparity then "The Pitchforks are Coming."
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014/
This is what's going on.
Sure, this particular person probably had a personal reason but the internet reaction to it is all about pitchforks.
People are happy with the insurance they have as long as they don’t have a major medical problem that will prompt claim denials.
I’ve got mine and if insurance for “those people” costs me a nickel , no way. They can use ERs.
In Moore’s Sicko, he described both hospitals and insurance companies maintaining armies of experts very savvy in medical claims. Hospitals used them to maximize their insurance claims, while their insurance counterpart was dedicated to "not" paying. Two significant healthcare industry expenses having absolutely nothing to do with providing healthcare for us
We do need insurers to keep an eye on patterns that indicate fraudulent activity in provider billing. There is a lot of it! Particularly in Florida.
But it is much easier and more profitable to take a blanket "deny and see what happens" approach. That's what has people up in arms.
I agree with dvhall99, they can get away with this game because most people don't have super-expensive claims. I have had modestly expensive claims in Medicare Advantage and had no problem with approvals. But what if I needed a drug that costs $10K or more per month? A big component of the problem is that we allow outrageous drug pricing, unlike every other country.