Dear Readers,
If you read anything this year exposing the hidden injustices in our health care system, it should be STAT’s new investigative series, Health Care’s Colossus.
Our second story, out today, has unsettling implications for millions of patients enrolled in private Medicare Advantage plans. The investigation found that, to squeeze more profits out of unsuspecting patients, UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest health care company, pressed thousands of its clinicians to use a thinly tested medical device to screen people for artery disease, dramatically boosting government payments. Many of these patients were not even sick.
We have more coverage in the works on how United has transformed itself into a modern-day Standard Oil, exerting unmatched dominance over health care in the United States. This series builds on our run of stories last year on how the company used algorithms to cut off care for seniors — a body of work that has been showered with major national journalism awards.
You can read these exclusive stories and so many more – we often publish a dozen stories a day – if you sign up for our premium subscription, STAT+. Subscriptions enable us to fund all our journalists, including the accomplished and deeply sourced team of reporters behind these stories, Bob Herman, Tara Bannow, Casey Ross, and Lizzy Lawrence.
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This week we also released the fifth annual edition of the STAT Report “Ranking biotech’s top venture capital firms,” the most comprehensive public examination of how well biotech investors are doing. In an accompanying article, Allison DeAngelis describes the slow pace so far this year and hints of easing pressure. STAT+ subscribers get a special discount to the report.
Thank you for reading STAT, and I do hope you’ll take advantage of our special discount subscription rates, which also give you other benefits, like discounts to our events around the country. Please let me know if you have feedback. I’m at [email protected]
Richard L. Berke
Co-founder & Executive Editor