“…it’s not just that Luigi was handsome. One reason many found it hard to completely condemn the murder is that so many Americans are furious with UnitedHealthcare.”
After Luigi they changed the approval ratio to prevent it (for a brief period)
And nobody went bankrupt.
It’s why insurance in any form should never be privatized, and absolutely never publicly traded because the insurer would be obligated to prioritize profits over literally everything else.
Social services aren’t to make profit, they’re so necessary we agreed as a society no one should make a profit off the process. Just operating costs like salaries.
UnitedHealth Group brought in $447bn in 2025, making it the third-highest company by revenue in the US behind Walmart and Amazon and ahead of Apple.
Money made entirely from shaving off care that people need. It’s not all necessarily from denying someone a massively (and wrongly) expensive treatment either. Each little uptick in copay, coinsurance, etc., be it even $5, goes into that number, and they’ll keep doing it.
As Oliver covered in the episode, they also make money hand-over-fist by encouraging ‘upcoding’ to extract maximum dollars from the government. So they’re simultaneously denying coverage (to save money) which is harming and killing people, while charging exorbitant prices to the consumers (to make money), while also stealing taxes allocated to help those people (to make even more money). It’s a triple-whammy.
‘Arbiters’ implies some kind of balance, or greater reason behind their actions, when in fact the algorithm is designed to squeeze as much profit as possible, which goes hand in hand with the denial of necessary care, leading to sickness and death. It’s more accurate to call them ‘Murderers’.
Death panels!