The Luigi Mangione Effect

“A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy.”

These words, found in a note written by the man accused of killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, have reminded many of this fact.

Privatized healthcare has turned the patient into the consumer. Physical health is now a commodity.

And this means more and more strategic attempts to extract as much coin from patients as possible. Insurance companies scavenge medical records and send nurses to perform at-home assessments in the hopes of finding as many diagnoses as possible. Donald Berwick, whose physician’s practice had recently been acquired by UnitedHealth, noted two things that had changed since the acquisition:

“I have to see more patients each day. And my patients have new diagnoses that I didn’t put there.”

While Berwick notes that these new diagnoses haven’t changed how the patients are cared for, they have nonetheless resulted in lighter wallets for patients and greater profits for CEOs. Health is now big business. As the physician Dhruv Khullar writes:

Ask not what your insurer can do for you — ask how much revenue you can generate for your insurer.