Record your health insurance horror story, send the audio as an email file attachment TODAY to: TMIShowQuestion@gmail.com and we’ll play it and comment on it tomorrow on The TMI Show with Ted Rall and Manila Chan.
We Hate Health Insurance Companies. 3 Reforms Would Help.
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The arrest of a suspect in the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a street in midtown Manhattan leaves some questions unanswered. But the gleeful reaction to the executive’s slaying leaves nothing subject to interpretation. Many Americans feel that they have been treated so shabbily by the health insurance industry that they despise it and want their leaders to die—and they’ve been willing to say so loudly and publicly.
I’m 61. I can’t recall the demise of any public figure being greeted with as much glee and dark humor, including the killing of Osama bin Laden. Which makes psychological sense. If someone is trying to kill you, you hate them.
Health insurance companies are trying to kill us.
While Americans were shocked and some even traumatized by the 9/11 attacks, most individuals didn’t feel personally threatened, much less harmed, by Al Qaeda. On the other hand an insurer like United, which is reported to deny a whopping 32% of in-network claims, wields the power to overrule doctor’s orders, harass sick people at their most vulnerable and, given the sky-high health costs in this country, put medical treatment—the ultimate non-discretionary expense—out of reach. Rare is the health insurance customer who can’t tell a horror story of being unfairly turned down for reimbursement for a doctor’s visit or procedure, usually after being given the runaround over pre-authorizations, procedural codes, doctors erroneously listed as in network, and other Soviet-style nonsense.
Sometimes health insurers decide that people—people like you—shouldn’t receive life-saving care. Patients die every year due to the health insurance industry’s sinister profit model, which heavily relies upon quotas for automatic and in many cases automated denials.
Even when health insurance works as advertised, it feels like a scam. You pay a monthly premium yet, even when you have a legitimate claim, you probably won’t be able to collect a reimbursement due to high deductibles that can exceed $10,000 a year. Insurers’ online directories of in-network health providers are years out of date; most of the doctors listed no longer accept the company’s insurance (or never did), have moved their practices, or are retired or deceased. “In a 2023 analysis, researchers surveyed nearly 450,000 physicians in the Medicare provider database that appeared in online physician directories for UnitedHealth, Elevance, Cigna, Aetna, and Humana,” Jacobin reported. “They found that only 19 percent had consistent addresses and specialty information across all the directories in which they were found.” (Failing to keep these lists up-to-date is illegal under the 2022 No Surprises Act (NSA), but the federal law is not enforced.)
There ought to be more difference between the experience of being uninsured and paying for insurance.
Health insurance companies create misery that feels intensely personal. The fact that a procedure or medication ordered by your physician, whom you know and has examined you personally, can be overruled by an anonymous individual who has never laid eyes upon you in a completely opaque process can be maddening. Insurers want to make more money and are willing for you and your loved ones to suffer great pain, and perhaps even death, in order to maximize revenues.
“Our role is a critical role, and we make sure that care is safe, appropriate, and is delivered when people need it,” UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty reassured employees in an internal video following Thompson’s killing. “We guard against the pressures that exist for unsafe care or for unnecessary care to be delivered in a way which makes the whole system too complex and ultimately unsustainable.” He hasn’t learned a thing.
This, of course, is bullshit. Companies like UnitedHealthcare are leeches, a net negative to the patient experience. No one believes they are “guarding” us against any danger whatsoever. They aren’t fighting “complexity;” they are the complexity. They add an additional, unnecessary layer of bureaucracy between sick people and healthcare providers, with only one goal: profits.
The obvious solution is to abolish the medical insurance industry and join the 69% of the world’s population that has some form of universal healthcare. For the foreseeable future, however, massive donations by the health insurance lobby both to Democrats and Republicans make it highly unlikely that something like Medicare For All, popular among voters of both parties, will be enacted anytime soon.
Still, the staggering hatred by health insurance consumers for the current system creates a political opportunity for the politician or party willing to push through three simple reforms to protect health insurance consumers from the industry’s most predatory practices.
First, if a physician is listed as a member of a health insurance company’s network, an insured patient’s experience should be frictionless. In network, no claim for a visit, test, procedure or medication should ever be denied. Pre-authorizations should never be required.
Second, if an insurer believes that one of its network member physicians is overprescribing or otherwise abusing the system, the dispute should be resolved between the insurance company and the doctor. An insurer can sue a rogue doctor, kick them out of their network, whatever, but leave sick patients out of it.
Third, failure to update lists of in-network physicians should inconvenience the insurance company that fails to fulfill its responsibilities and comply with federal law, not those of us who are seeking medical care. We deserve truth in advertising. If an insurer lists a doctor as being in-network on their website or elsewhere, patients should be reimbursed for visiting that doctor under the doctrine.
As President-elect Trump formulates his policies for his second term, I hope that his powerful instinct when it comes to gauging public opinion has taken note of our hatred of the for-profit health insurance industry. Pushing through these three reforms would enjoy bipartisan support and begin to fulfill his pledge to fix the badly-broken American healthcare system.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
TMI Show Ep 35: “Assad Falls; What Now for Russia in the Middle East?”
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Ties between Syria and Russia go back not only through the Soviet Union but even to Czarist Russia. Now, presumably because Russia is so focused on Ukraine, it was unable to save its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, from being deposed by Islamist insurgents. Assad is safely in Moscow but Damascus is a different matter.
Americas who remember the optimistic coverage of the fall of Baghdad in 2003 know better than to take similar images and coverage seriously now. International security analyst and Russia expert Mark Sleboda joins Ted Rall and guest co-host Robby West (filling in for Manila Chan) on “The TMI Show” to talk about the broad international implications of the collapse of the Syrian state, rising instability, and where Russia and Iran go now when it comes to influence in the Middle East.
DMZ America Podcast Ep 184: It’s Vigilante Time!
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The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) discuss a pair of stories that reflect a disturbing trend: as the government turns more lawless and fails to enforce the law, Americans are taking the law into their own hands—and voters seem to approve.
A Manhattan jury acquitted Daniel Penny, the subway rider who strangled a mentally-ill homeless man, Jordan Neely, using a choke hold that the NYPD is banned from using in the line of duty. And Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old man accused of shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson to death in New York has become a folk hero to patients angry at the way they’re treated by health insurance companies.
If the system fails, is it acceptable to roll “Death Wish” style? Ted and Scott debate the social and political ramifications.
TMI Show Ep 34: “The Talibanization of Syria”
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This feels like a movie you’ve seen before: a secular socialist government where women and ethnic minorities have rights that are respected is targeted by the United States and its allies in large part because it shows that left-wing politics can be successful. The Carter administration armed the mujaheddin in Afghanistan, setting the stage for Al Qaeda and 9/11. The Bush Administration overthrew Saddam Hussein in Iraq, creating a failed state that became a vassal of Iran and a home for ISIS. Obama killed Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, creating a failed state where slave markets have reappeared and radical Muslim fundamentalists hold sway. Now an officially designated terrorist organization has, with the help of the US and Israel, overthrown Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Will Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its reformist leader Ahmad al-Sharaa keep their promise to limit their ambitions to Syria? Will they impose radical Taliban-style sharia law on Syria? What are the implications for Russia, which accepted Assad but did not provide sufficient air support to protect his regime? Israel has already started bombing Syria, saying that its 1974 peace deal was with the Assad government which no longer exists; will the war in Lebanon and Gaza spread into Syria even more? What are the security implications for Israel, which wanted this regime change, right next-door?
DMZ America Podcast Ep 183: The Censorship War Against Political Cartoonists
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The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) are joined by Terry Anderson of the Cartoonist Rights Network International to discuss the state of political cartooning in the United States and around the world during a time of political transition and the ongoing seismic disruption in the print media ecosystem that supported the profession throughout the previous century.
TMI Show Ep 33: “Deny, Defend, Depose”: Health insurance Horror Stories
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The assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson has shocked the nation, not because of the killing itself, but rather due to the widespread and gleeful public reaction to it. As the manhunt continues, social media and mainstream media comment sections are full of horror stories of desperately-ill people and their loved ones attempting to navigate a byzantine health insurance system designed to thwart easy access to medical care and payments to doctors.
Co-host Manila Chan is out today, suffering from pneumonia as well as the vicissitudes of the healthcare system—she got worse because she couldn’t get easy access to antibiotics. Holding down the fort with co-host Ted Rall is TMI Show producer Robby West, who “enjoys” a front row seat amid the chaos and cruelty that is America’s healthcare system.
Democrats Haven’t Really Won a Presidential Campaign Since 2012
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As Democrats survey their recent losses in the election, they should avoid drawing conclusions or floating prescriptions for fixing their party’s problems. First, they should absorb the biggest data point that is currently being ignored by both the progressive and the corporatist wings of the party: they haven’t really won a presidential election since 2012. No, 2020 doesn’t count. Not really. Read on.
Democrats don’t yet recognize it, but they have effectively messed up three consecutive elections against Donald Trump. This points less to a divided country wobbling back-and-forth between two parties than to a systemic realignment in favor of the Republicans. For Democrats, this suggests a serious set of systemic problems unlikely to be fixable by nipping and tucking messaging and candidate presentation.
I am not an election denialist. Trump officially lost in 2020. But Biden, doddering even at the time as he campaigned from his basement, didn’t really win.
Covid shaped that race in two significant ways. Donald Trump committed political suicide in both. Trump’s unforced errors in 2020 were so easily foreseen and so bizarre that it’s hard to imagine another candidate ever committing political malpractice to such an extreme. Of course Democrats were able to beat him then.
It was a weird election.
First Trump shot himself in both feet with Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership launched between March and May 2020, at the start of the lockdown. Epidemiologists and ordinary citizens alike fantasized about developing a vaccine, but experts cautioned that it would take ages. “Officials like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top infectious disease expert on the Trump Administration’s coronavirus task force, estimate a vaccine could arrive in at least 12 to 18 months,” the New York Times reported on April 30, 2020. “The grim truth behind this rosy forecast is that a vaccine probably won’t arrive any time soon. Clinical trials almost never succeed. We’ve never released a coronavirus vaccine for humans before. Our record for developing an entirely new vaccine is at least four years—more time than the public or the economy can tolerate social-distancing orders.”
“Never succeed” succeeded. Relying on emergency use authorizations and conditional approvals, the first vaccines became available to the public starting December 11, 2020. By April, anyone who wanted one could get one—a mere year after Warp Speed began.
This was a miracle. A study by the Commonwealth Fund estimated that the vaccines prevented more than 18 million hospitalizations and saved the lives of 3.2 million Americans. They saved the budget $1.15 trillion through November 2022.
Fast action to develop vaccines, something a more conventional politician like his 2016 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton might have been hesitant to approve without additional testing prior to approval, was Trump’s greatest accomplishment during his first term. Best of all from a political standpoint, timing made it the mother of all October surprises—had Trump chosen to run with it. The president could have informed a traumatized electorate a few weeks before election day that they would be inoculated against the deadly coronavirus, not four or more years in the future, but mere weeks or months away.
Insanely, Trump ran away from his big win. To be sure, Trump did announce that vaccines were on the way. But he did so in an uncharacteristically muted manner. His highest-profile and highest-volume pandemic messaging, influenced by his wacky supporters and political allies, many of whom subscribed to unorthodox medical views including anti-vaxxers and those who thought Covid was a hoax, deteriorated into an incoherent morass that understated the impact, including the number of deaths. “That’s all I hear about now. That’s all I hear. Turn on television—’Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’ A plane goes down. 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it,” Trump said at a campaign rally in North Carolina on October 24, 2020. “Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’ By the way, on November 4, you won’t hear about it anymore.” On October 26, he continued to downplay the scale of the pandemic as a “Fake News Media Conspiracy,” saying the U.S. had the most cases on earth only because “we TEST, TEST, TEST.”
Thanks in large part to Trump, however, Covid vaccines were the fastest ever created. Due to internal GOP politics, however, Trump felt compelled to run away from Operation War Speed and, in doing so, threw away his best issue. An October 2020 Reuters-Ipsos poll found Trump underwater on his handling of the coronavirus crisis, with 37% approving and 59% disapproving. It was though FDR had denied having anything to do with the New Deal when he ran for reelection in 1936 and gotten dinged for making the Depression worse.
Similarly inexplicable and tied to the vagaries of paranoid right-of-center internecine discussions, Trump repeatedly advised his supporters not to cast an early vote before election day or vote by mail, alternatives that exploded in popularity due to the pandemic lockdown, on the ground that they were rife with fraud. “MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES,” Trump tweeted in June 2020. “And, you know, when they talk about Russia, China, and all these others, they will be able to do something here because paper ballots are very simple—whether they counterfeit them, forge them, do whatever you want. It’s a very serious problem,” he said in September 2020.
46% of ballots were cast via early or mail-in voting in 2020, double the result for four years earlier. But only 62% of Trump voters voted early or by mail, compared to 82% for Biden.
It was an incredibly stupid mistake. It wasn’t one that the Trump campaign repeated this year.
Democrats convinced themselves that their 2016 loss was a fluke attributable to sexism, Russian interference and the novelty of Donald Trump, celebrity and TV star, as their opponent. They took comfort in the fact that Trump had been defeated in 2020 and therefore possibly would be again.
What they failed to grasp what is that the real anomaly here was 2020. Had Trump exploited the triumph of Operation Warp Speed and encouraged his supporters to cast early and mail-in ballots—any vote, any time, is a good vote—he would almost certainly have beat Biden. They foolishly assumed that Trump learned nothing from his previous campaign, that he would not correct his mistakes.
For the first time since 1892, we now have a presidential candidate who ran in three consecutive elections, largely on the same issues, the border and the economy. Trump won twice and lost once, but that once was due to his suicidal moves. Whatever Democrats decide to do to try to become stronger and more viable going forward, they need to understand that they haven’t had a strong enough candidate to beat a real Republican running a normal campaign in a conventional presidential campaign since Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
DMZ America Podcast Ep 182: United CEO Killed: Vigilantism or Justifiable Homicide?
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The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) dig into the shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Does the misery intrinsic to the profit model of companies like United Healthcare justify violent acts like this in a society where there is little recourse for justice? Or is taking the law into your own hands always inherently wrong? And is there any chance that corporate America might start to rethink its rapacious business practices?
TMI Show Ep 32: Did Brian Thompson Have It Coming?
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Yesterday morning the 50-year-old CEO of United Healthcare, Brian Thompson, was shot to death on the sidewalk in midtown Manhattan by an unknown assailant. Even including the reaction to the death of Osama bin Laden, it’s hard to think of another high-profile murder that has been greeted with as much glee and schadenfreude by the American public.
Comments sections in news stories and social media were filled with comments about how Brian Thompson had it coming, hopefully this is the first of many, and countless jokes about the bullet that killed him being a pre-existing condition. Almost no one expressed sympathy. TMI Show co-host Ted Rall and, filling in for Manila Chan, producer Robby West, explore this remarkable phenomenon.
United Healthcare is one of the most hated big companies in the United States, in large part because it denies its customers claims at a higher percentage rate than any other insurer. Thompson, paid over $10 million a year, was a poster boy for an industry whose profit model relied upon making people sick and dead to maximize earnings. The hatred was internal as well as external: even as company executives raised their own pay, they laid off thousands of their own workers.
Adding to the intrigue, Thompson was being investigated by the Justice Department over a $15 million sale of United stock suspected as insider trading, and which caused a selloff.
What was the motivation behind the assassination? Will other healthcare executives reconsider their business practices? Or will they just hire additional security? Could this help to spark a national conversation about for-profit healthcare? One thing is for sure: it is 100% clear of that Americans of all political stripes hate the healthcare industry. Because in America, whether you have insurance or not, you don’t get healthcare.
