A former UnitedHealthcare employee has revealed that they were systematically trained to deny medical claims and the training went for the first two or three months with supervisors standing behind and monitoring how quickly the representative is getting off the call. Natalie Collins told NewsNatoions that there was no instruction on how to actually pay the claim but the entire training was about different ways to deny the claim.
“We weren’t given proper instruction to actually pay the claim, and there wasn’t enough monies in certain files in certain companies to pay medical claims,” Collins said. “We would have to just get the client off the phone as fast as we could.”
UnitedHealthcare sprang to the news after its CEO Brian Thompson was murdered in front of a New York hotel. 26-year-old Luigi Mangione was arrested on charges of the murder but he pleaded not guilty. Mangione was not a customer of UnitedHealthcare but according to the investigators, he took up the murder as vigilante work.
Majority of Americans don’t blame Luigi Mangione solely
Apart from the online lionization of Mangione because of his looks, and Ivy League college education, the majority of Americans don’t hold Luigi Mangione solely responsible for Brian Thompson’s death. They blame health insurance profits and coverage denials too for the murder of Thompson. An NORC poll reveals that 8 in 10 adults said that Mangione has a “great deal” or a “moderate amount” of responsibility for the December 4 shooting but about 7 in 10 adults said denials for health care coverage by insurance companies or the profits made by health insurance companies also bear at least a “moderate” amount of responsibility.
Earlier, Prison consultant Sam Mangel who is working with other inmates at the Metropolitan Detention Center revealed that Luigi Mangione is sleeping on a mattress that’s 2 inches thick at best and has no separate pillow.
‘Supervisors laughed as patients cried for money’
Collins, the former UnitedHealthcare staff, said the supervisors used to laugh as desperate patients used to cry for money. Collins quit her position after attempting to approve payment for a widowed mother of five whose husband died of pancreatic cancer. The supervisors ihad instructed her to deny the claim and get the caller of the phone line. “They just wouldn’t allow me to submit the claim. There would be alerts on each claim telling us that either we had to put it back in our queue and it would just go to someone else, 30 days later, 60 days later,” Collins said.
Collins said she condemns violence though she understands public anger. “I don’t believe anyone should die … but people are angry. People have reasons to be very angry, and I feel that to my bones. I’ve seen it, I lived it, I processed them and I denied them.”
