Member-only story
Healthcare, Accountability, and Public Frustration
A Perspective on the UnitedHealth Crisis
Grown dissatisfaction with healthcare system in the United States is seen in recent controversies surrounding UnitedHealth Group. Critics are also questioning the company’s limits on access to autism treatments, like Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), the gold standard of treating autism. Lawsuits charging violation of federal parity laws, that require equal treatment of mental and physical health conditions, have followed. Meanwhile, the public outrage has grown by virtue of an assassination that followed, of Unitedhealth’s CEO, Brian Thompson, an event that shows the poisonous volatility around healthcare issues in America.
Yet what we call systemic flaws in healthcare coverage (which are in actuality systemic flaws our medical and insurance industries perpetuate) are not new. There are numerous denied claims, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and cost over care policies that often prioritize profits over care – that are common issues patients regularly experience. For instance, UnitedHealth justified exclusions in the autism controversy by saying the law was not broken – even while court rulings contradicted that. This reflects a more general problem in regulatory enforcement: families often are forced to litigate in court against insurers in order to achieve treatment.
The Interplay Between Corporate Power and Public Discontent
So the power wielded by healthcare providers are actually big and in many case it is empowered by political framework which tend to protect corporate interests. But all the more visible become the structural weaknesses of the system as public dissatisfaction builds. The CEO’s assassination was a piece of tragedy, but these events also indicate the lack of public trust in the corporate and governmental institutions to find appropriate solutions of the basic needs of society, and are grim indicators of the society’s frustration.
Opinion: Principles for Change
Excessive centralization of power in insurance markets, the result of lobbying and overregulation that suppress competition, is responsible for the healthcare crisis. Decentralization of healthcare decisions is…
