The Chris Cuomo Project - Chris Cuomo on Why Americans Are So Angry About Healthcare

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

In the wake of the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Chris Cuomo dives deep into America’s broken healthcare system, examining why so many are furious with the health insurance industry and its role in driving costs, denying care, and putting profits over patients. From the staggering influence of companies like UnitedHealthcare to the moral dilemmas surrounding end-of-life care, Cuomo raises urgent questions about how the system exploits the most vulnerable—and what it will take to create real change. 00:00 Intro 00:10 Why Americans Are So Angry About Healthcare 29:36 Outro Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday: https://linktr.ee/cuomoproject Join Chris Ad-Free On Substack: http://thechriscuomoproject.substack.com Support our sponsors: Shopify Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Untuckit uses. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at SHOPIFY.COM/chrisc Cozy Earth Want your Cozy Earth pajamas by Christmas? Order by December 13 for free shipping! Missed it? You can still get expedited shipping until December 20 to ensure it arrives in time. Head to cozyearth.com/CHRIS now and use my exclusive code CHRIS for up to 40% off. AG1 So this new year, try AG1 for yourself – it’s the perfect time to start a new healthy habit. And that’s why I’ve been partnering with AG1 for so long! And AG1 is offering new subscribers a FREE $76 gift when you sign up. You’ll get a Welcome Kit, a bottle of D3K2 AND 5 free travel packs in your first box. So make sure to check out DrinkAG1.com/ccp to get this offer! Get Maine Lobster Listeners of The Chris Cuomo Project get 15% off all orders store- wide with the promo code CUOMO. That’s right—15% off the freshest lobster you’ll find anywhere. So this season, create new memories, make it extra special, and add a touch of Maine to your holiday table. Visit GetMaineLobster.com and use promo code Cuomo #cuomo #news #crime #healthcare #nyc #politics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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CozyEarth.com slash Chris. If you get a post purchase survey, please tell Cozy Earth that you heard about them from the Chris Cuomo Project podcast. It'll help us keep doing business. This is Chris Cuomo. Welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project. Here it is. The people who are saying Luigi Mangione assassinated a health care CEO and they are not that upset about it or they're not upset at all, I get it. They are not wrong per se. How? The guy assassinated somebody. You've been saying Cuomo that this is crazy to think

that this can be a good thing. That's all true. But two things can be true at once. And what that young man did is a crime all day long, is wrong all day long. And by the way, he picked the wrong CEO. You may not like UnitedHealthcare, but do your homework on Brian Thompson as a man and how he is regarded by other people in the industry. He did the wrong thing, the wrong way to the wrong guy,

but he picked the right industry to demonize. The health insurance industry in America is the closest thing to a Frankenstein of capitalism human beings have ever known. Not health care, health insurance. Now people don't even usually think about that bifurcation. It's all related, right? Doctor, urgent care, hospital, nursing home, rehab, PT, wellness, surgery, chronic care, that's all part of it because who pays and how? Whoomph!

Into insurance. Who pays to what happens what if? What happens for regular care? What happens for prescriptions? what happens for prescriptions, what happens for long-term care, what happens for workers' comp, what happens with nursing and staffing, billing its own industry.

What do you bill for, what are the codes, multiple codes, policing codes, transparency of what any of these things mean, intentionally manipulative language in the explanations of your benefit plan that nobody reads and those who do can barely understand, deductions and co-pays, denials where the health insurer is judge and jury.

You get denied. Why? Oh, you can appeal to the same guy. Well, our experts say who picks the experts? They do. Now here's the problem that makes it a real monster because even on that as massive as I made it sound, it's not the biggest industry in the country, right? I mean if you net it all up between the brokers

and the servicers and the adjusters and the lawyers and the agents and then all the clinicians and then all the management and then all the administrative, you get into the millions, but not more than retail or other major industries. But it's one of the biggest. It's not the biggest, but one of the biggest. It makes some of the most money. It's a huge employer, makes a lot of money.

All right, but it's not the top. So why, what makes it different? Nobody else has that kind of control over life and death. The amount of money that we spend at the end of life, the thing that makes this industry such a fucking monster is that it is finding ways to make money off the hardest aspects of human existence. When do you stop helping someone survive?

They decided on the basis of actuarial tables and statistics and algorithms that are all designed to do what? Make us the most healthy? No, to make them the most money. That's what makes this business so crazy is that, and so easy to hate, is that it's so important to you, right?

Because as a part of your monthly nut, after what you pay to live somewhere, health insurance may be one of the biggest bites that comes out of you unless you're lucky enough to be employed by a place that has enough people to create a big enough pool to give you reasonable numbers. If you're self-insured, forget it. But if you're part of a smaller business

or something like that, you know. Health insurance costs can be a biggest part of your nut. And that is assuming nothing goes wrong in your life. I mean, the whole time you need insurance is when something bad happens. Young people don't need it because they're healthy, right? Now with COVID, that changed a little bit, right? Now you got young people getting sick and you have excess mortality. Let's just look at that term for a second

to understand why people hate the health insurance business. Excess mortality. What does that mean? It means that more people are dying of this thing than we calculated would when we figured out what to charge you to be protected from it. How does that fucking hit you? Too many dying, we're gonna have to raise the cost of protecting people from this. Even though they're young, it's easy to hate. It was easy to hate even for a young man who as far as we know, wasn't even victimized by it.

Luigi, the assassin, had a life of privilege funded by the profits from the healthcare industry. His family owns nursing homes. Wow, the irony. Well, but maybe it's not irony because in his case and in many others, the anger, the animus is irrational. Health insurance is easy to hate. Now at the same time, you look at this one business and there is no industry in America

that does more good and arguably creates more pain. At the same time, the health insurers will dump on your head a million pounds of stories of them changing people's lives and by extension what they allow hospitals to do, care they allow the hospitals to give, and procedures that they fund and research and this drugs that they make available that you'd never have. They'll dump it on you all day long. Believe me, I've been covering it for years. But when you think about,

what are you gonna do with this moment? For Brian Thompson's life to not be in vain, you almost have to reward an assassin by giving a fair appraisal of this business. And supposedly Brian Thompson, while a young man, 50 I think he was, he was someone who was known to push for modification and change and evolution within the business.

So it's almost like for his life to have mattered on one level, although he did so many tremendous like for his life to have mattered on one level, although he did so many tremendous things with his life. Another irony here is that a kid of privilege assassinates a guy who worked his own way up and was self-made. But when you look at the business, the fundamental problem with health insurance is that you have things that cost a lot, that matter a lot,

and those judgments are not based on what's best for the patient necessarily, but they're balanced with profitability. And their priority as a company, no matter what they say, in a for-profitprofit system has to be shareholder return. So who's gonna lose every time there are competing interests? You, right? Who wins with the car company about what to charge for the car?

The car company, because they gotta stay in business. They gotta keep the shareholders. The shareholders being happy is more important than the patients being happy. Think about it. The middlemen costs, that's all this is. It's all extra admin. Hospital, patient. Who's in the middle? The insurance companies. They're all middlemen. It's all extra admin. And then you get into what really pisses people off.

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Get yourself to a better place today. Try it. You'll like it. Everything I just said is more than enough to create a really delicate balance of whether or not this is ethical. Now you get the tricks. Complex billing systems. The United States spends more on healthcare administration

than any other country. Why? Billing and coding, which achieves two things. One, it creates all of these costs of people who have to do this work, accounting work, figuring out what to code, whatnot, and why. And it's really deceptive to the payer, which is you. And there is an argument to be made

that is intentionally so. And then you have like the change between all the different companies, but that's true in a lot of businesses where different rules apply to different places. The next reason that people can very easily hate this industry more than others is that people are interfacing with this company at their weakest very often. They're sick or they're taking care of someone who's sick. So they're distressed when they're being asked to be on their game by a company

that is playing games with them all the time, what they call opaque pricing so you don't get sued. What does that mean? That there's a lack of transparency. You don't know what things are gonna cost, what the drugs are gonna cost, what the procedure's gonna cost, what the ancillary costs are gonna be.

You don't know. Very often you don't know at all before. So you can get literal surprise bills at a time where you're not at your best, emotionally, physically, or both. And all of the rates are negotiated outside of you, right? With the providers and the insurers. And you're not even really part of that.

So you don't even even have a hand in what they're gonna charge you. Unlike every other business. And again, opaque pricing can also mean hidden fees. In a way that would make used car salesmen jealous. Deductibles, copays, coinsurance. What is the difference? When do you reach it?

What qualifies? what doesn't? Then you get into the next step, which is because you don't understand it, now you're not going to understand the outcome. You get denied. You wind up owing money. Everything's so expensive in healthcare because everybody's negotiating rates, assuming they're gonna get haircuts by all these different people in the industry

trying to make money, except you. You're the only one who doesn't really get a break. So, now you start getting denied services, cares, denied claims, having, denied claims, having to pay more, you want to appeal, you've got to appeal the same place. Very hard to get the information, but I will tell you that what I have been told

over the years about the rate of success on appeal, you know, makes it look like you got a fair shot at appealing a criminal conviction. Which you really don't. Some would say that that speaks well of our trial process. Others not. Drug costs. Okay? A pill for every ill is how we've been running healthcare in this country for a long time,

generationally. A lot of people on a lot Of things I'm on two three medications. I'm supposedly relatively healthy You don't get to negotiate price in Other countries they do the United States doesn't allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices That's why when they brought insulin down that one drug, they only did it for the Medicaid people. Why? Because the businesses got too much juice. And look, even Trump, the big disruptor, how often you hear him talking about taking it to the health insurance companies? Now you would have thought he

would have picked him, right? He tries to pick targets of opportunity, right? What will please the base? How many MAGA folk? You talk about one of the great uniting things in our country would be how they hate how their health insurance works. Now look, I'm painting them in a bad light because of what just happened to try to justify

why people are having this bizarre or what seems like what should be a perverse response to it. But there's a reason for it. And you'll have people who say, my health insurance company saved my kid's life, did this, did that. I'm telling you, they'll dump those stories on you. But they've got all of us.

So you're gonna get a lot of outcomes, favorable and unfavorable. And the question is, what's the ratio? Pharmaceutical and insurance. The insurers, the pharmacy benefit managers, work with pharmaceutical companies to prioritize profits over affordability. This is gonna piss off sick vulnerable people and Then you've got the whole fact of how it works almost, but you know most the majority of us get our insurance Through our employer. I get it through a union, but most get it through an employer. So what does that mean? Well, they're the one who cut the deal

and If you don't have a job, it means you don't have coverage Cobra can get expensive fast So what does that mean? Well, they're the one who cut the deal. And if you don't have a job, it means you don't have coverage. Cobra can get expensive fast. You don't have great choice like you do with every other service that you take on for yourself because the employer negotiated it, either accept it or you don't, even if it doesn't meet your needs. High out-of-pocket costs, people do not have the money, we are not a saving culture. Medical debt is a huge thing. Millions of Americans, even after paying for insurance,

because of high out-of-pocket expenses, it bankrupts people. And then you get into the elderly. I've only been dealing with the healthy population. End of life. We spend these exorbitant amounts of money on end of life. Do you know how many stories I could tell you of people, I'm gonna be one of them, by the way, who says to their family, do not spend the money.

But very cleverly, we have a system that allows you to pay through the nose and go broke trying to keep someone who's going to die alive a little bit longer. But we are not allowed to allow someone to figure out when they want to die. Not really. Palliative care, letting them starve to death, hoping for pneumonia. Can't euthanize. But you can make the family go broke for the next generation, keeping someone alive

who wants to die. What does that tell you about how the system's set up? Well, that's humane. Puh, don't tell it to my family. I've watched multiple grandparents. I watched my father. I watched my father die in a way and over a period

that he would have been so disgusted that we allowed it to happen. And how is that okay? The money that we spent at the end of his life, doing things that he didn't want us to do because we weren't allowed not to, and they get you emotionally, you know, I'm good.

Hold the plug. They know this. They bank on it. It's where they make their money. That's why they're so easy to hate. It's also the problem with hate. It's also the problem with hate. Because you wind up being what you oppose. You wind up acting and thinking like them.

Oh yeah, but I'm desperate and nothing else works. That's bullshit. You don't get civil rights that way. You don't get any meaningful change that way. Why? I got to be like them. Some of the oldest philosophy is the Stoics, ancient Greece, Rome, Marcus Aurelius, who they called the last of the good emperors. Qualified assessment.

Ask the Christian scholars how he was to the Christians. He said, the greatest revenge is to not be like who you oppose. That's the greatest revenge, is to be better. That was surrendered by people who celebrate what this little scumbag did to the healthcare CEO. But I get why they're so angry about the health insurance system, really the health care system overall. It is a business that's so tied to profits that it really doesn't even have a nod,

let alone a main inclination or focus on wellness and prevention and rewarding people who are healthy, I get why they hate it. And it's really powerful. I'll tell you what it does have. The lobbying power of this overall several headed monster between point of service, pharmaceutical. So you get big pharma, you get the hospitals and the doctors and everybody else and the PT and the therapy and the rehabilitation

and the chronic care and the pain care, the palliative care, pain management, the insurance. You get all of it. You get millions of employees, but you get a lot more concentration of power in lobbying. These mofos lobby like nobody's business. And they've got a lot of juice. And that's why you don't hear Trump, the great disruptor,

the one who can't be, you know, drain the swamp. Well, these are the biggest gators in the swamp. And he doesn't even say their name. He keeps their names out of his big mouth. Why? Should tell you something. Should tell you something. And I'm looking at the revenue models here.

United Health is the biggest. That's why he picked this guy. I still wanna know how Luigi knew that he was gonna be in front of that hotel. And he'll tell us. This guy's gonna tell his whole story. He's gonna get all celebrated about it. He's not gonna be able to make any money off it,

but he's gonna talk because that's all he's got left with his life. United Health Group is 362 billion, 2023. CVS, Aetna, $351 billion. Anthem, $168 billion. The top five are $900 billion in revenue. That's more than most countries are able to put together as a GNP. And look, again, it's not the biggest in the country, but it doesn't have to be because it's so unique. Tech is almost twice what it is in terms of revenue. And tech is like this, okay? I'm not going to die. I'm probably going to gonna die because of this not because I don't have it But health insurance you can't get you med you can't get me that's why this business matters so much

That's why that the fact that it does what any other business does let alone worse is intolerable for so many and They may be 18% 20% of the United States GDP, the gross domestic product, but they're so much more influential than that, for good and for bad. And yeah, they'll come back to you and say, you know, our profitability margins are much lower

than everybody else's. Yeah, but the volume and the ability to manipulate the marketplace that they have, that's why they can keep their margins small and they have so many different pockets they're hitting. It's just, look, it may be smaller, but it's a much bigger footprint in society and its role in managing not just a big part of our economic reality, but our health, our well-being. It's tremendous. And they do not do the job the best way they could. It's not even close. And that's why people are so angry. But again, two things can be true at once.

The healthcare industry should be called out. This guy was picked and not an automotive guy. I don't know why all these other CEOs, I don't believe this is gonna be Occupy Wall Street times 10. This was very targeted to a business that deserves to be targeted. Not for assassination, but for change.

And I do not think this may change more likely. I think it made less likely. I'm gonna try and I'm sure others will too to try to bring something positive out of it just so that the evil of this instinct doesn't win the day. But to see these people, especially young people, so filled with enmity when they haven't even really felt the bite yet of these things the way the next generation has. And to think that this is okay.

When you think that something this wrong is okay, your chance of making anything okay is very, very small. And I hope that that point gets through as obviously as the ones that I've made here about why this industry does need to change. Because there is change that is really needed and it just got less likely because of this one stupid guy. I'm Chris Cuomo. Thank you for joining me on The Chris Cuomo. Thank you for joining me on The Chris Cuomo Project. Thank you for subscribing and following. You should know more about the health insurance industry.

It's going to affect your life. It affects society. It's one of the things we need to take on as a society to make better. And we don't because we're afraid of it because of how it's got its tentacles into us and how much power it has with the people in power. I'll see you on NewsNation weekdays 8 and 11 P. If you like the pod but you don't like the ads, I get it, I love my advertisers but I get it. Subscribe through the sub stack. Just five bucks a month you get it ad free, you get it first. And you want to show that you're an independent and wear your independence, show that you're a free agent,

buy the gear. We use the money to crowd source contributions to worthy causes. My friends, the problems are real. Be a critical thinker, get the information. And then have a set of principles that you stay tied to because you're about getting to a better place, not worse. Let's get after it.