I wasn’t planning to write an article today.
I’ve been fighting to get back on Rinvoq—a medication that costs over $5,000 a bottle—and was dealing with some pain this morning. The bone and muscle aches from my condition, caused by my body attacking its bone, cartilage, and organs, are relentless.
I have insomnia, and it is difficult to get comfortable enough to sleep at night.
I’d recently been prescribed steroids, which help a little but not much, as to endure the nightmare of pre-authorization to access my meds.
Rinvoq has been instrumental in helping me manage some of my symptoms as well as in keeping my iritis at bay—the same iritis that once threatened to blind me in one eye and led to my initial diagnosis. If you look at the picture, it’s probably obvious which eye is at risk—the one that’s constantly swollen.
Thankfully, after being initially denied, my claim was eventually approved. My husband joked that maybe Brian Thompson's death changed their minds.
I was lucky—I eventually received my medication, but what of the countless millions who don’t and die?
Healthcare claim denials are on the rise
With hundreds of Americans dying daily from continued systemic abuse, read:
Millions of Americans in the past few years have run into this experience: filing a health care insurance claim that once might have been paid immediately but instead is just as quickly denied. If the experience and the insurer’s explanation often seem arbitrary and absurd, that might be because companies appear increasingly likely to employ computer algorithms or people with little relevant experience to issue rapid-fire denials of claims — sometimes bundles at a time — without reviewing the patient’s medical chart. A job title at one company was “denial nurse.”
Denial. Nurse.
Let that sink in.
And yet, I had the misfortune of encountering a troll who claimed Americans are so spoiled they’d blow up a Taco Bell over a wet taco. This was his response to people's anger toward our broken healthcare system.
I told him slap off and muted him, but if you’re curious, he’s still in the comment section of my last Substack post:
Sadly, people are trotting out all kinds of nonsense that distract from the real issue at hand:
PEOPLE. ARE. DYING.
Needlessly. In droves.
I follow Dah Lawd GOD on Substack, and he shared some hard-hitting facts I feel compelled to pass along. Keep these in mind the next time someone dares to equate a nine-year-old dying from lack of care to something as trivial as a soggy taco:
"Funny how society wasn’t in decline when UnitedHealthcare kept $20 billion of their subscribers’ money in 2022 while denying countless healthcare claims. Or when American cancer patients paid $16.22 billion out of pocket in 2019, while UnitedHealthcare alone walked away with $33 billion in profits. They could have covered every cancer patient’s treatment and still pocketed $17 billion—but where was the moral outrage then?"
– Dah Lawd GOD on Substack
Now, there’s all this noise about Brian Thompson’s wife and kids, as if the millions of people killed by denial-driven AI systems didn’t have families who loved them too—wives, kids, grandparents, sisters, brothers, and friends.
Trae Crowder, aka The Liberal Redneck, makes a brilliant case for this in this recent video on the topic:
Let me be clear for the pearl-clutchers: I do not condone murder. But I’m also not here to muster sympathy for the CEO of a company responsible for immense suffering and the preventable deaths of countless Americans.
Miss me with all a-that!
I mean, are we really going to tell the father of a nine-year-old cancer victim to lay a wreath on Thompson’s grave? Seriously?
UnitedHealth uses faulty AI to deny elderly patients medically necessary coverage, lawsuit claims
The families of two now-deceased former beneficiaries of UnitedHealth have filed a lawsuit against the health care giant, alleging it knowingly used a faulty artificial intelligence algorithm to deny elderly patients coverage for extended care deemed necessary by their doctors.
The lawsuit, filed last Tuesday in federal court in Minnesota, claims UnitedHealth illegally denied "elderly patients care owed to them under Medicare Advantage Plans" by deploying an AI model known by the company to have a 90% error rate, overriding determinations made by the patients' physicians that the expenses were medically necessary.
"The elderly are prematurely kicked out of care facilities nationwide or forced to deplete family savings to continue receiving necessary medical care, all because [UnitedHealth's] AI model 'disagrees' with their real live doctors' determinations," according to the complaint.
Medicare Advantage plans, which are administered by private health insurers such as UnitedHealth, are Medicare-approved insurance plans available to elderly people as an alternative to traditional federal health insurance plans, according to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The use of the allegedly defective AI model, developed by NaviHealth and called "nH Predict," enabled the insurance company to "prematurely and in bad faith discontinue payment" to its elderly beneficiaries, causing them medical or financial hardships, the lawsuit states. — CBS NEWS
P.S. I enjoyed Jimmy Kimmel’s recent bit—his opener had me howling—but his jokes about people obsessing over Luigi’s good looks appeared to allude that this is why they support him. Uh—no. People are hardwired to notice beauty, but this is not what’s driving the “Free Luigi” movement.
Giving people shit for noticing attractiveness is akin to wanting to shun a friend for seeing the color yellow. It is a mere incidental—the fact that Mangione is a hot-babe- muffin-of-a-folk-hero increases his attractiveness to some. I am not applauding it, but get why some want to know him in the biblical sense.
This focus, added to all the “But, but, but he is a rich boy,” nonsense from the MSM, is muddying the narrative.
My 3-Minute Video on the topic:
Let’s not get it twisted—two families are suing UnitedHealthcare for using AI to deny claims for their critically ill loved ones. And guess who greenlit that monstrosity?
So please—spare me the violins for Brian Thompson.
Let us not lose the meat of the message—the new shot heard around the world is a rallying cry to end the exploitation of the poor, period. Anything else is just white noise being used to distract from a point the powers that be don’t want you to consider.
Besides, if you think the death of a CEO is somehow more tragic than the countless lives stolen daily by a profit-driven healthcare industry—an industry people pay for only to be denied care—then it’s you who doesn’t have a moral leg to stand on.