Friday, February 18, 2011

How United Health Group is Screwing Your Grandmother

I'm the guy who just told your grandmother that she's going to have to come up with an extra fifteen dollars a week out of pocket to cover her insulin. I sat at my computer and patiently listened while she told me how Social Security is her only income and she just didn't know how she was going to pay for these increases in food costs and prescriptions and the electric bill. But after all that all I could say was, "I'm sorry, but United Healthcare just isn't going to pay for the increase."

I cut off your grandmother after attending an employee meeting with the big wigs of UHC where they gleefully told us how great a job we were doing and how terrific the Medicare Advantage Prescription Drug sales were going and how wonderful it is to be taking such good care of our old people. And how United Health Group just made 2.7 billion dollars. We should be so proud of ourselves!

Can't make that extra fifteen for you insulin, grandma? United Health Group executives have some advice. Try skipping lunch an extra day a week. Screw you, grandma.

How did this happen? When I moved back to my home town of Roanoke, Va., a couple of years ago after an almost forty year absence, I needed a job. United Health Group has a very large call center here and, despite my extreme dislike for health insurance companies, I applied, got hired, went to class for three days, took a state test, and became a licensed health insurance sales agent in all fifty states. My experiences there did not improve my opinion of the industry, to say the least. There was never any doubt about the number one priority:  get the sale.... period.

This was during the height of the health care bill debate, and we would get regular emails from company execs about how we should write our representatives and tell them this, that, and the other about what was good or bad about the bill. Of course somewhere in the email would be the proviso, and I quote... "(this is voluntary)." We were coached on how to explain why the company was discontinuing coverage, called Service Area Reduction, which basically meant that UHG didn't make enough profit there that month so we were dumping our seniors, who we're so happy to be taking such good care of, in the street.

Whenever the customer service lines got overloaded we in sales ended up taking their calls. Time and again we sat there listening to grandma and grandad telling us their stories of how food was going up and how uncle Henry had to have his medicine and there just wasn't enough money.... on and on and on.

Our lunch room conversations centered around things like, "I can't believe the shit I'm having to tell people." I started to feel dirty, I mean really filthy, about even being in the building. When my shift ended I couldn't wait to get home and take a shower.

I realize not everyone there was in my position. After seven months of cajolling people into buying a Medicare Advantage Plan that had a higher deductible than last year and would pay for even less, I quit. It encourages me to know that not a single person who was hired with me is still there, mostly for the very same reasons.

The experience raises some interesting questions. Given the economic and medical situations of our elderly, how much is too much money to make? individually as a corporate exec, or employee? How much is too much for a company to make? Couldn't some of that 2.7 billion be used to help cover a few dollars more of grandma's insulin? And how much moral responsibility does an employee incur working for a company that, despite it's protestations and cloaking it's every action in the mantel of corporate righteousness, is screwing grandma? How do these people sleep at night?

The long term answer is universal health insurance, single payer system, with a strong public option to compete with companies like UHG that have essentially no competition. Yes, there are other health care companies. But if you compare their prices online you'll find they're price fixing. You pay the same price for the same coverage no matter what company you choose.

With fewer and fewer of us being able to afford any kind of health insurance, forcing premiums up; with hospital and doctor and drug costs going through the roof; the system as it is will not last a lot longer. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Especially in the US, a country ranked by the World Health Organization as thirty-seventh in providing health services to it's citizens--just behind Costa Rica. Not to mention our having one of the highest infant mortality rates in the industrialized world. I could go on.

Sorry to break it to you grandma, but that company that's telling you how much they care and how well they're going to take care of you.... that's a sales pitch.... and nothing besides. It's an empty promise some guy or girl sitting behind a computer screen reading a script is getting paid to tell you, knowing all the while that what's hidden in all that fine print they're required to read you is what's not going to get paid this year. Believe me, they can't wait to get home and shower off the filth.... and find another job.