Much needed attention has been brought upon the for-profit health insurance industry in the wake of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Personal stories about people’s tragic experiences involving not only UnitedHealthcare but many other insurance companies have spelled out a deeper issue that resonates across the American political spectrum.
Sean Morrow, a journalist and writer for More Perfect Union—a nonprofit newsroom that focuses on working class issues—has gained significant attention lately as a result of the shooting. Morrow joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence to further elaborate on the issues millions of Americans are facing and why Brian Thompson’s assassination led to such a widespread public reaction.
Morrow dives into some of his reporting, which has dealt with the internal processes behind the health insurance system. Among insurance companies, there is a consolidation process in the form of vertical integration. Companies like UnitedHealthcare can own multiple parts of the healthcare process and thus set up toll booths along each route people can expect to take. “They'll have pharmacy benefit manager companies, they'll have data companies, and then they kind of own this entire system, so that they're always routing you through there,” Morrow says.
“If you have a health issue, you could theoretically be giving UnitedHealthcare a little bit of money from every step of the process. And they're their own vendors in all of that,” he explains.
“The system's not broken. The system's working as it's intended,” Morrow tells Scheer. The system, Morrow says, is intended “to funnel more and more money to a certain handful of people at the cost of all others.” Despite the legality of this system, the rigging of it against the interests of the working class is what enables their suffering as well as their anger against it.