UnitedHealth Group's "Firing Squad"
Another round of layoffs leads to a surprising amount of original reporting in this newsletter.
When I started writing about UnitedHealthcare, I didn't think it would go like this. What you're reading today is breaking news fresh from insiders at UnitedHealthcare.
In the beginning, I imagined I was making fun of a behemoth… playfully. Like most other companies, particularly public companies, I imagined they had meaningful constraints on their behavior. When I started making TikTok videos about United Healthcare? I was reporting the news. I didn't imagine they would get over 1 million views. I was making videos, all of 15 seconds each. Next, sources started sending me information. Those messages were from insiders at United Healthcare. Some of them are still working at United Healthcare. A markedly different story has just started to emerge. I was not prepared for it.
I did not start as an investigative journalist. I'm a psychiatrist. I have close relationships with colleagues in industry. I don't want to offend them.
It's hard to avoid United Healthcare in America. I don't even avoid United. I still use ConnectCenter, which is part of Optum and, in turn, part of United. My employees have United Oxford as their health insurance, which I pay for. As a small company in New York City, I didn't have other options. This is the business model of a 1/2 trillion dollar empire:
“What else are you gonna do?”
United had a massive round of layoffs yesterday, and it's worth noting that they have never done a robust job of reporting things to the federal WARN Act database. The point of the act was to have a place in which mass layoffs had to be reported, among other things:
The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act helps ensure advance notice in cases of qualified plant closings and mass layoffs. The U.S. Department of Labor has compliance assistance materials to help workers and employers understand their rights and responsibilities under the provisions of WARN.
Yesterday, hundreds of people were laid off in Texas and Florida. I still don't know if this would violate the WARN Act, but it almost doesn't matter. United Healthcare provides so much money to politicians in Congress! Enforcement actions against it will never ever make a change in behavior— or a dent in it’s remarkable profits.
I've spoken to former insiders at United Healthcare who described their interactions with the Department of Justice…in their attempts to blow the whistle. The following is paraphrased: