For most Americans, an aspect of their lives designed to enhance their health — their health insurance — may be actively harming it instead. One physician recently published her opinion in The Hill, where she described the myriad of ways that private healthcare is leading to poor health outcomes for Americans.
What's happening?
Dr. Shravani Durbhakula opined that the increased media attention after the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson "forces us to confront an uncomfortable reality." She wrote that "frustration with the unchecked power of publicly traded insurance companies has reached a boiling point, for patients and doctors alike."
Specifically, she explained the regular practice of denying care and treatment has put profits over patients, rejecting evidence-based treatments as "experimental" in order to avoid paying for them.
"They use opaque and unreliable artificial intelligence algorithms to deny care and rely on the medical record notes to contextualize the humanity of my patients," Dr. Durbhakula argued. "Access to such life-changing treatments is frequently out of reach, sacrificed at the altar of corporate profit."
For the healthcare companies, it's working: UnitedHealthcare reported over $20 billion in profit in 2023, per Forbes. But for patients, she said, it was the worst-case scenario. "When cost-cutting trumps medical necessity, the system fails everyone except the shareholders," she wrote.
Why is insurance particularly controversial right now?
Another complication facing the industry is the question of how these providers will handle climate-related health issues.
Pollution-driven warming of our planet has led to very real health impacts around the globe. A hotter atmosphere has led to more severe and deadly storms, as well as an explosion in the population of disease-spreading pests like mosquitoes; climate-related increases in air pollution have made it the No. 1 cause of death for children.
All in all, the World Economic Forum estimated that 14.5 million premature deaths will occur as a result of the changing climate. And when it comes to insurance, this begs the question: Who pays?
This issue has already been hotly debated in the world of property insurance. And with severe natural disasters on the rise, many major providers have caused outrage by withdrawing from disaster-prone areas, leaving homeowners without alternatives.
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Heck yes! 💯 What can be done?
Dr. Durbhakula suggests several ways to reform the healthcare industry, encouraging improved transparency, federal standards, and an increase in expert reviews.
But when it comes to addressing the underlying issue of the warming planet, it will be up to all governments and industries — from the banks who invest in polluting companies to the retailers who generate massive amounts of air pollution — to hold themselves accountable for reducing their impact, for the sake of everyone's future.
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