That is indeed the case, though there's more to those numbers. Thos are numbers for prior authorization denials, but they're also from a report focused on Medicare Advantage plans for elderly and disabled folks (you know, the people who would be most fucked over by denials). Pulled from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Thompson_(businessman)
The investigation revealed that in 2019, UHC's prior authorization denial rate was 8.7%. Thompson became CEO in 2021, and by 2022 the rate of denial had increased to 22.7%.
As an added bonus, there's also this insanity that he tried to push through:
In 2021, Thompson was criticized in an open letter from the American Hospital Association regarding a plan from UnitedHealthcare to start denying payment for what it deemed non-critical visits to hospital emergency rooms. UnitedHealthcare responded by delaying rollout of the change.
I wonder if UHC has ever denied coverage to victims of gunshot wounds?
No.... also for who he was. As the CEO of that company, he is directly responsible for the deaths and financial hardships of many who depended on and paid his company to provide protection and relief from those things. And he did that not just through ineptitude or negligence but through willful action that prioritized his bottom line over human life. Fuck him.
The thing is though, he is merely a symptom of a sociopathic society, economic, and political system. UH under his leadership may be the most egregious example in US healthcare, but the fact remains that the current system rewards psychopathy and narcissism with wealth and power. There is an endless supply of criminally corrupt scabs just like him that will step up to take his place for a chance at being the slave master.
Greed, exploitation, extortion, fraud, theft, corruption, murder, terrorism, authoritarianism, ecocide, genocide; all of these are rewarded or condoned on some level by our "democracies" as long as you do it behind the shield of an LLC, in the name of profit.
We are on a rock floating in the middle of nowhere, that took billions of years to materialize a biosphere out of nothing, in a cold and desolate universe, and the system we have chosen is aggressively annihilating it all in the blink of an eye. We are a cancer that is killing our host.
THE WORLD HUMANITY HAS BUILT — THE REALITY WE ACCEPT — IS PSYCHOTIC!
I mean part of it is he is the ceo. Its like if anyone is responsible for the bullshit companies do its the ceo and board of directors. I think a lot of folks would like them to fear for their lives is their corps are fucking folks over. Maybe they might decide limiting anesthias medicine in surgeries is not such a hot idea or such.