UnitedHealth Group: Profit Over People in America's Healthcare System

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight tackled UnitedHealth Group, the largest insurance company in the US, which served over 50 million people last year. The company has a reputation for denying claims and making it difficult for patients to access necessary care.

The show highlighted several cases of patients who were denied coverage or faced unexpected costs for medical treatment, including a young woman with cervical cancer who was advised by six oncologists to undergo proton therapy but was denied coverage by UnitedHealthcare because it surpassed the 'standard of care'. Her parents paid $95,000 out of pocket for the treatment, which ultimately worked.

Oliver also criticized UnitedHealth Group's vertical integration, where they own subsidiaries in various aspects of the healthcare industry, including primary care clinics, surgical centers, and pharmacies. This allows them to make money on both sides of transactions and accumulate massive amounts of data through their 'massive data-sharing panopticon'.

One such subsidiary is OptumRx, which has a history of abruptly switching what drugs it will cover, leading to unexpected costs for patients. In one case, Cole Schmidtknecht's asthma medication was suddenly dropped from coverage, and he had to choose between paying the high price or other bills.

Oliver argued that this is a result of an algorithmically driven system that prioritizes profits over people, leading to 'ruthless arbiters of who lives and who dies'. He suggested that UnitedHealth Group should not be allowed to exist in its current form and advocated for a single-payer healthcare system or at least separating the payer and provider roles in healthcare.