The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has sparked extraordinary public interest in the nation’s health insurance industry. Much of the outcry has centered not on the killing itself but on health care executives — who have become symbols of an industry seen as too often inclined to focus on its bottom line, not the health of customers.
A team of STAT journalists spent the last two years diving deep into how UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, UnitedHealth Group, operates and its impact on the health of Americans. In this video, our reporters distill what they’ve learned about the company and explain why STAT focused so singularly on it.
This year, in the ongoing series “Health Care’s Colossus,” STAT documented how UnitedHealth wielded its unrivaled physician empire to boost its profits and expand its influence. The year before, in the “Denied by AI” series, STAT exposed how UnitedHealth used an unregulated algorithm to override clinicians’ judgments and deny health care, highlighting the dangers of AI use in medicine.
STAT reporters Casey Ross, Bob Herman, Tara Bannow, and Lizzy Lawrence have reviewed thousands of pages of documents, pored over reams of data, and convinced dozens of clinicians to speak with them to reveal the untold costs of UnitedHealth’s dominance.
They show how UnitedHealth has turned health care into an assembly line that treats millions of patients as products to be monetized. And they chronicle how the $5 trillion American health care system came to be so broken.