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United Healthcare links of the moment

2024-12-05 17:03:37.982631+01 by Dan Lyke 0 comments

Apropos of ... uhh ...

Cory Doctorow: The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you: When monopoly meets infosec, hilarity ensues.

How did we end up with Change Healthcare as the linchpin of the entire American prescription system? Well, first Unitedhealthcare became the largest health insurer in America by buying all its competitors in a series of mergers that comatose antitrust regulators failed to block. Then it combined all those other companies' IT systems into a cosmic-scale dog's breakfast that barely ran. Then it bought Change and used its monopoly power to ensure that every Rx ran through Change's servers, which were part of that asbestos-filled, termite-infested, crack-foundationed, sag-joisted teardown. Then, it got hacked.

Via

ProPublica: How UnitedHealth’s Playbook for Limiting Mental Health Coverage Puts Countless Americans’ Treatment at Risk

So when a California regulator cited United for its algorithm-driven practice in 2018, its corrective plan applied only to market plans based in California.

When Massachusetts’ attorney general forced it to restrict the system in 2020 for one of the largest health plans there, the prosecutor’s power ended at the state line.

And when New York’s attorney general teamed up with the U.S. Department of Labor on one of the most expansive investigations in history of an insurer’s efforts to limit mental health care coverage — one in which they scored a landmark, multimillion-dollar victory against United — none of it made an ounce of difference to the millions whose plans fell outside their purview.

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