Sir Andrew drivels and quibbles in The New York Times
UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty has spoken.
His words were carefully sculpted, packaged and published by The New York Times as an opinion essay. The headline reads: “UnitedHealth Group C.E.O.: The Health Care System Is Flawed. Let’s Fix It.”
Incredibly, Witty, a former advisor to the Chinese government, wrote his dreck under a pseudonym. He appears in the paper of record as Mr. Andrew Witty, quite a comedown from his ascension announcement as the new CEO of UnitedHealth Group as “Sir Andrew Witty:”
Perhaps the omission was deliberate?
The CEO of UnitedHealthcare’s parent company makes $23 million per year, which is 352 times the median salary of a UnitedHealth employee in 2023, which was $66,821. He wraps it in a blanket of tripe with this platitude, while offensively comparing himself to them:
The people of UnitedHealth Group are nurses, doctors, patient and client advocates, technologists and more. They all come to work each day to provide critical health services for millions of Americans in need.
LOL.
The amazing thing about this essay is that it was written in the first place, and deliberately offered to a global newspaper.
The man who signed his name to it instructed a team of people, which includes personal advisors, lawyers, PR firms, lobbyists, consultants, and corporate drones to write it because he believes that what they told him is true.
What they told him was that America needed to hear from him, despite his having nothing to say whatsoever. He/they claim that [emphasis added]:
We know the health system does not work as well as it should, and we understand people’s frustrations with it. No one would design a system like the one we have. And no one did. It’s a patchwork built over decades. Our mission is to help make it work better. We are willing to partner with anyone, as we always have — health care providers, employers, patients, pharmaceutical companies, governments and others — to find ways to deliver high-quality care and lower costs.
UnitedHealth Group is a brutal company that operates in a brutal manner. It feeds on the misery of ordinary people who learn the hard way that UnitedHealth is insurance in name only for millions, beggared by its avarice.
I’m a United Healthcare customer. I can tell you from my own experience that it is an awful company. It is abusive, indecipherable and coldly indifferent. I despise it — not because I had back surgery — but because it doesn’t do the things it promises to do, which is par for the course in 2024.
There is something to be noted about the connection point of The New York Times as a hub of moral idiocy, connecting its former superstar Taylor Lorenz and Sir Andrew, its newest contributor.
Lorenz triggered Piers Morgan’s finest moment when his extemporaneous indignation and incredulity at her maniacal laughing over the cold-blooded killing of Brian Thompson triggered this epic interrogatory:
What the f*ck are you laughing at?
What the f*ck, indeed.
It should be noted that America has celebrated many killers over the years, and a certain type has always made some hearts aflutter.
The young nitwits on TikTok celebrating Luigi’s “hotness” should look more closely at this face:
Do they like it?
Most are too young to remember another handsome young guy with a great head of hair and a killer smile:
I imagine he looked more like Luigi as he was bashing the brains out the skulls of defenseless sorority sisters at the Chi Omega house at the University of Florida in his grande finale.
Evil has always drawn people towards it, while repelling others who can see it clearly, directly and even presciently.
Sir Andrew represents a type of evil, though it cannot be combatted by an embrace of greater evil.
Sir Andrew is a predator who is more skilled with spreadsheets than anyone else at UnitedHealth Group. It made him very rich, but not wise, decent, or remotely interested in improving the broken system that made him possible. His highest priority in life is to maintain a system in which someone like him, who provides nothing to the patient or physician, and is not involved in treatment or prevention in any way, can make more money per year than ten of the nation’s best neurosurgeons put together.
Sir Andrew is not alone. America’s CEOs have lived in a delusional world for the last 25 years, where the leaders of public companies have become kings, while their employees have become indentured and destitute.
Murder is always evil, but it can also be seminal. Assassins, including mentally ill ones, have shaped history since it was first written down.
The rage and evil triggered by a cowardly act is a warning that will not be heard because it cannot be heard. The evidence of this is the tone-deaf screed of nothingness by a CEO in The New York Times. He does not care about you, in a marketplace where its predations are ignored by the regulators and legislators. They allow men like Sir Andrew to take as much as he pleases.
Thirty-nine days from now at high noon Donald Trump will take power. The greatest age of corruption in American history will begin. Perhaps the best words to describe it might be the “F*ck It Era.” as in “we are going to take as much as we can take for as long as we can,and do whatever it is that we want because we have power, and power means having a license to take.”
My friends, catastrophe is here.
Sometimes an essay about nothing can say a lot.
Unlike a television show about nothing, there is nothing funny about an essay about nothing from Sir Andrew, who definitely had something to say, but just can’t figure out what that is.
Instead, because he’s “Sir something,” CEO of something big, and he has a lot of consultants, someone told him that it was important to speak now — that it was his “moment to lead.”
Of course, it is all nonsense — just like his drivel in The New York Times that literally couldn’t play it straight from the first letter.
Sir Andrew thinks he has a problem that he can bullshit his way out of. It is an interesting take for someone who assesses risk for a living. He doesn’t seem to get the meaning of the reaction to a cold-blooded killing.
Maybe it’s because he is out of touch?
I wonder what advice he would have given to the governor of Guangzhou, China?
Maybe the Chinese are impressed by the King’s bestowment. Here in America we tend to be less so when lectured by “Sir something-lots” in their snooty and affected tones. Historically, it triggers our national “go f*ck yourself” instinct, which the British learned about the hard way once.
It seems that everywhere one looks these days there is a Brit somewhere in America vandalizing something whether it’s Will Lewis in the Washington Post newsroom or Joanna Coles at The Daily Beast.
If you happen to be advising one of these out-of-touch dauphins, maybe the thing to say before the next platitude is this:
Mind your manners. Don’t talk. Do better. Say less. No one trusts you. You earned it.
Speaking of medical issues, MAGA legislators in Oklahoma are proposing a new state law that limits emergency exceptions when the life of the mother is in danger. Reading between the lines: women are expendable.
These people stop at nothing. But I remind myself that a majority of men and women voters in that state elected them.
Thanks, Steve, for your perfect response to that outrageous op ed piece published by the Times.
Here's my posted comment to that article.
"When I have sued the large insurance companies for wrongful death due to mismanaged care, their standard first response is words to the effect: " We don't provide care for patients. We just pay bills." Mr. Witty knows they do much more than that as you can see by his call to work through them to reform the "patchwork" non system. Made even richer by the passage of ObamaCare in 2010, the health insurance companies essentially own Congress, the Executive Branch and almost all state legislatures. They have used their money and lobbying strength to fashion a lottery system of care that rewards their stockholders and overpaid top executives first, while patient care, particularly for the poor and medically unsophisticated, takes a distant second. And Mr. Witty neglects to tell readers that a division of his company employs about 100,000 U.S. doctors raising questions of whether patients can trust them to put patient needs first. The prior authorization process routinely denies necessary care with an appeal process that creates turmoil in doctors offices, requires thousands of employees to fight for what is often life-saving care, and has been responsible for about half of all U.S. doctors experiencing burnout. And now Mr. Witty cynically asks for suggestions about how to make things better."
Many years ago in the 1990s when I appeared on a panel with the CEO of Kaiser and the chief lobbyist for AARP which pedals UHC managed care products, I likened managed care doctors and clerks to the Nazi doctors who made decisions about lives not worth living remotely based on review of paper records. All of this current publicity about outrage over prior authorization decisions for profits by managed care entities makes it look like these rationing care processes are new. They are not. They've been going on for 40+ years and getting worse. The HMOs have gotten richer and now billionaire owners call the shots about who lives and who dies with help from their servants in Congress and state legislatures and the courts.
I was rebuffed by more than one CNN and big 3 network producer while trying to report egregious examples of patient harm with media arrogance and certainty that doctors were just rich, incompetents trying to provide unnecessary care. As for the NY Times, they cancelled a meeting at the very last minute not wanting to hear about a one year undercover investigation of the HMO industry (Sam Donaldson reporter, John Siceloff senior producer ) that was killed by ABC-TV. Don't forget that the major cable and network media companies -- video and print -- are recipients of huge advertising dollars from the managed care industry -- as in incessant ads for Medicare Advantage (HMO) care that is "free" but costs taxpayers $billions more than fee for service Medicare.