UnitedHealth's K Street Army

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/health/2025-01-16-unitedhealths-k-street-army/



Earnings figures released Thursday morning showed the indefatigable nature of health care platform conglomerate UnitedHealth Group, which raked in a record-breaking $400 billion in revenue last year and $34.4 billion in adjusted net profits. Despite being crippled all year by a cyber attack in its Change Healthcare unit that could have destroyed lesser companies, and despite the murder of its insurance division CEO Brian Thompson that triggered an outpouring of revulsion for a company associated with denial of care, UnitedHealth was simply too big to fail in 2024.

In an earnings call, UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty had a message for investors: Setting revenue records wasn’t his company’s focus. It instead was “making high-quality, affordable health care more available to more people while making the health system easier to navigate for patients and providers, positioning us well for growth in 2025.”

Left unsaid was UnitedHealth’s blueprint for dominance in the health care industry: paying an army of 50 lobbyists $5,860,000 in 2024 to shape governance of the industry in its image. A Prospect review of dozens of lobbying disclosures shows that staffers with access to the highest levels of the Democratic and Republican Parties worked around the clock to lobby on bills that could eat into UnitedHealth’s astronomical bottom line.

In 2024 alone, UnitedHealth paid two ex-staffers for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY): former chief of staff Cedric Grant, and Sandra Alcala, who managed Jeffries’s member services. Jeffries has stayed silent on the slaying of Thompson, but recently told the rapper Fat Joe in a November interview, “I say often when I’m back home talking to folks about a number of issues … In our community more people die from drive-throughs than drive-bys. We gotta deal with the gun violence problem but when you actually take a step back there are more people dying from lack of access to healthy food, lack of access to health care.”

snip

[Think. Again.]

1. $34 billion worth of denied claims.

[tenderfoot]

2. This still doesn't justify Mangione's actions