UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty wrote in a New York Times op-ed Friday that the for-profit U.S. healthcare system “doesn’t work in addition to it ought to” and that “nobody would design a system just like the one we’ve,” admissions that got here as his business confronted a torrent of public anger following the homicide of UnitedHealthcare’s chief govt.
Witty declared that his agency, the mother or father firm of UnitedHealthcare and the nation’s largest personal insurer, is “prepared to companion with anybody, as we at all times have—healthcare suppliers, employers, sufferers, pharmaceutical corporations, governments, and others—to seek out methods to ship high-quality care and decrease prices.”
But critics did not purchase Witty’s expressed dedication to reforming an business that his firm has helped form and profited from massively. Witty was the highest-paid healthcare govt within the U.S. final yr, and 40% of the personal insurance coverage business’s complete revenue because the passage of the Affordable Care Act has flowed to UnitedHealth Group.
“It is (barely) true that UnitedHealth did not design the U.S. system of company insurance coverage, which kills tens of hundreds of individuals a yr by way of denial of care,” Alex Lawson, govt director of the progressive advocacy group Social Security Works, advised Common Dreams. “But they actually have perfected it and turned it right into a medical homicide equipment at industrial scale. They not solely block all makes an attempt to alter the system within the route of public well being, they bribe and bully with their billions in blood cash to make it even crueler.”
“Andrew Witty is the excessive priest of the temple to Moloch and Mammon, homicide and cash,” Lawson added. “And there is no such thing as a method for him to clean his fingers of it, besides maybe to resign after which dedicate each greenback he has to dismantling the present system brick by brick and constructing one based mostly on public well being in its stead.”
“Medicare for All is the one proposal on the desk able to delivering common, steady protection for everybody, whereas additionally securing the effectivity and financial savings solely potential by way of the elimination of personal insurance coverage.”
While publicly pledging to cooperate with reform efforts, Witty has defended his firm’s care denials in personal and urged his staff to not interact with media shops within the aftermath of Thompson’s homicide.
Contrary to Witty’s depiction of his firm in his Times op-ed, UnitedHealth has traditionally been an aggressive opponent of reform efforts aimed toward mitigating the harms of for-profit insurance coverage and constructing public alternate options. The Leverreported in 2021 that UnitedHealth Group “held a webinar to strain its rank-and-file staff to mobilize towards efforts in Connecticut to create a state-level public medical health insurance possibility.”
At the nationwide degree, UnitedHealth has spent over $5.8 million this yr lobbying federal lawmakers, in response to OpenSecrets.
Michael Lighty, president of HealthyCalifornia Now, provided condolences to the household of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in an e-mail to Common Dreams and argued that supporters of healthcare justice should reject reform paths “managed by financial elites corresponding to collaborations like Andrew Witty invitations.”
“Our demand is definitely easy: free healthcare paid for by our taxes (like firefighting). Let’s construct on this highly effective second of righteous outrage to alter what’s potential,” Lighty added. “The healthcare business wants to know that they aren’t placing this genie again within the bottle: The healthcare system is a most cancers that can take down anybody who defends it.”
Witty, who was born in a rustic with a public healthcare system, didn’t element the sorts of reforms he would assist in his op-ed Friday, but it surely’s clear he would oppose a transition to a single-payer system corresponding to Medicare for All, which might successfully abolish personal medical health insurance and supply protection to all Americans free of charge on the level of service—and at a decrease complete value than the established order.
In a column for The Nation on Friday, author Natalie Shure argued that “the appalling quantity of sources and power we put into sustaining the existence of medical health insurance is wasted on an business with no social worth in any respect.”
“You may remove each considered one of these companies tomorrow and construct a system with out them that works higher, for much less cash, and with much less trouble,” Shure wrote. “Other international locations have already got programs like this. Medicare for All is the one proposal on the desk able to delivering common, steady protection for everybody, whereas additionally securing the effectivity and financial savings solely potential by way of the elimination of personal insurance coverage.”
“None of that signifies that homicide is justified or helpful,” Shure added. “But anger might be. Some politicians, from Bernie Sanders, to Elizabeth Warren, to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have begun to make public statements ascribing the response to Brian Thompson’s homicide to widespread fury over the medical health insurance business. The subsequent step is to harness it, and to construct one thing new.”
This story has been up to date to incorporate remark from Michael Lighty, president of HealthyCalifornia Now.
