UnitedHealth Group website, October 15, 2021 https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/
By MD Mazza
UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest health insurer, announced recent earnings on October 15: $4 billion in profit on earnings of $72.3 billion--for just one quarter of 2021! Investors and executives have to be ecstatic. They're the real winners in the dismal US healthcare “market,” a system whose claim to fame is that it's the most expensive in the world. How much actual healthcare—not health insurance/healthcare rationing—could Americans get for $288 billion a year? (And that’s the estimated annual revenue of just one US health insurance company.) Even worse, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company's revenue growth in 2021 came from higher health insurance premiums (premiums rose 12%).
United’s current CEO has a $17 million annual compensation package. The former CEO retired after less than 4 years on the job and got an exit package of two years’ salary and bonuses, probably $40-$50 million. For leaving.
This is what passes for healthcare in America—a giant profit-seeking grifting operation to get a cut of the approximately $4 trillion the US spent on healthcare in just 2020.
UnitedHealth is not now and never has been on a “journey to improve healthcare”? Like other providers in our capitalist healthcare system, it’s on a journey to line executives’ and investors’ pockets.
Meanwhile, working Americans forego healthcare, declare bankruptcy from medical expenses, and pray they never get seriously ill, all while they’re beholden to employers for their health insurance like serfs to a feudal lord. The US healthcare system is straight-out savagery.