• Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    While everyone is understandably happy about this, I have to wonder if UHC’s competitors gained value at the same time. Because I could absolutely see investors dumping UHC because of its reputation now but continuing to invest in insurance companies, just moving their money. Selling off UHC stock to buy Anthem stock.

    • M1nds3nd@lemmy.ca
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      18 hours ago

      One would hope that would be a risky move. Other CEOs could be next if there are copycats. They should invest more in the military industrial complex. Those CEOs don’t get assassinated, they do the assassinating. Much safer bet.

      • JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        Wait can we use the stock market to bet on the next dead CEO? Brian gets murdered, Anthem goes up. Buy anthem, anthem CEO gets murdered, sell anthem (faster than the other idiots doing this) and buy a different company?

  • RangerJosey@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Anyone else remember when the math came back and universal Healthcare would have saved the US like $11,000,000,000 every year or every 10 years or something.

    Anyway, they chose not to do that because Citizens United made bribery legal. They did pass a republican Healthcare plan that didn’t actually change anything. Just made it easier to pick who was gonna fuck you and how hard on a convenient website maintained by GovCo.

    • LandedGentry@lemmy.zip
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      18 hours ago

      11bill every 10 years is actually not a lot saved for a nation as large as the US lol annually makes more sense. Either way curious to see the stats

      • AFaithfulNihilist@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        It would be 11 billion dollars cheaper than what we currently pay to not have universal healthcare.

        Our governments literally spend more per capita not having universal health care then it would cost if we had it. Your tax dollars are being used to fund a system to turn your health care into a wealth getting scheme.

        Less health care is delivered and it costs more when it gets there. No one saves any money in this system.

        • LandedGentry@lemmy.zip
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          10 hours ago

          Dude I am supportive of those changes and I actually imagine it will save more than that. Are y’all incapable of reading further down threads? The skepticism is that it seems low

      • RangerJosey@lemmy.ml
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        15 hours ago

        Objectively better by every metric as proven by every actual modern country in the Sol System. AND it’s cheaper.

        “Either way curious to see the stats”

        Do you even hear yourself my guy?

        • LandedGentry@lemmy.zip
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          15 hours ago

          I’m not sure what all the hostility is about given I am inclined to think the savings are actually more and I would like to see the information. I want to know what you’re citing because I think it’s interesting not because I am skeptical, and I agree it’s a better system that will probably save money so having the information is probably a good thing?

          Point your guns elsewhere dude, same team

  • pyre@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    if they’re not out of business, it’s not enough of a loss.

    completely unrelated but who’s the new ceo just out of curiosity?

  • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    Looking at that number made me think that it can’t be right unless the company has many customers (much more than Canada’s population) for it to make sense.

    Looked it up, and they have 52 million customers.

    So they make sooo much money from 52 million people that they have this amount to spare that would cover 40 million.

    Yeah, holy shit.

    Edit:

    Honestly, they didn’t even lose that much:

    • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      It is even wilder when one considers how challenging the Canadian Healthcare System actually is to run. They are on the hook to provide every citizen duty of care over a landmass 1.6% larger than the entire US. It regularly employs helicopter ambulances for access to remote communities and has exceedingly challenging terrain and despite this Canada has lower infant mortality, maternal mortality and longer life expectancy outcomes. On the Numbeo Health Care index which ranks quality of care, doctors and facilities it outpaces the US on that metric too. The Government run Medical Services Plan also covers partial on things like Massage Therapy visits, physio appointments and various services covering based on income so more people have access to those services at affordable prices.

      It does all of this on an income tax base that charges 4% less than that of the US. It’s a monumental effort keeping it afloat. The amount paid to insurers in the US, not even the system just insurance is just mind-boggling from a Canadian perspective.

    • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
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      16 hours ago

      That’s why private healthcare is so much more expensive than public healthcare. They constantly seek more and more profits.

      Americans always say their taxes will go up if they get free healthcare and yeah, no shit it needs to be paid by someone. Overall though they will pay much less than whatever insurance they are currently paying for because there is no profit involved.

      • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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        15 hours ago

        Yeah, and not only that, losing valuation can mean nothing in the long run. Tesla lost half its valuation and then beat its all time high.

        UHC exec suit still got paid their salary and bonuses.

    • Mongostein@lemmy.ca
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      15 hours ago

      That’s $1575USD for each Canadian at the rounded number of 40mil, or $2258CAD.

      In 2022 we spent $8563CAD per Canadian, according to the first source I found. (https://www.cihi.ca/en/national-health-expenditure-trends-2022-snapshot)

      Just crunching some numbers 🤷‍♂️

      Edit: continuing crunching:

      For their 56m customers, that’s $479.5B CAD, or $334.3B USD if they were to spend the same amount as Canada did in 2022.

      Now to find out how much they’re profiting yearly compared to how much they’re spending to find out how (roughly) how much you’re being ripped off…

      Edit: computing…

      Wow. Apparently they increased profit by $340% from 2023 to $168.9 in 2024. (https://m.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UNH/unitedhealth-group/gross-profit)

      According to this source, operating costs are only in the hundreds of millions.

      https://www.statista.com/statistics/622295/operating-costs-of-unitedhealth-group-by-type/

      They only have numbers up to 2023 and I don’t want to have to go back and change my numbers. This is time consuming and I want to go do something else. :)

      I can’t imagine operating costs rose by 340%. Someone else can finish the numbers, but my conclusion is: the situation is fucked up.

      Edit: back in the morning to say, even if we said operating costs were $999 million (To keep my earlier statement accurate)(I don’t feel like finding the numbers again) and they rose 340% in the last year to 3B, that’s still $165.9 billion dollars that should be spent on health care that they’re pocketing.

      • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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        1 day ago

        I appreciate you fact checking on this front; I’m a Brit who’s extremely in favour of universal healthcare, but I feel uneasy seeing international discourse about how comparatively cheap universal healthcare is when our National Health Service (NHS) seems to be performing worse than ever — both in cost and in helping people.

        My view is that the NHS is its knees because even a single-payer healthcare system isn’t enough to outrun market-based neoliberal economics, and that’s bad news for anyone who ever needs healthcare. It must seem like utopia to Americans who are suffering sorely under the insurance companies’ heel, but we’ve got a lot of pushing ahead of us.

        • Mr_Blott@feddit.uk
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          1 day ago

          You had 15 years of the Tories deliberately trying to run the NHS into the ground so they could announce it doesn’t work and then create a US-style for-profit healthcare system that their cronies could profit from

          My view is that the NHS is its knees because even a single-payer healthcare system isn’t enough to outrun market-based neoliberal economics

          Is exactly what they were pushing to justify this

          • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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            1 day ago

            Certainly the Tories did far more harm to the NHS than Labour would’ve if they had been in charge for the same period. However, if we consider how, under Tony Blair, did plenty to hasten the privatisation of the NHS in the 00s, this is, to some degree, a “bipartisan” issue. (Thatcher did say that New Labour was her greatest achievement)

            I think that as long as neoliberalism is the backdrop of economic truth that politicians are working on, we’re going to see this kind of erosion of the public good, like the NHS.

        • Mongostein@lemmy.ca
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          1 day ago

          I hear ya. As a Canadian I’m well aware of the problems with our “universal” health care, but at least no one here goes in to life-altering debt because they broke their arm.

          The US health system’s cost is not it’s only problem, I’m just comparing costs right now.

          • neomachino@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            15 hours ago

            It also costs like 100k to have a baby if everything goes right. And god forbid that baby needs any sort of medical care, the insurance company can just say “sorry, your baby isn’t insured” and make you wait to get them ‘onboarded’ to the insurance plan.

            That’s what happened to me and thankfully the pediatrician came into the hospital room as I was on the phone evidently in distress with the insurance company, hours after my son was born. My son needed a few test and some minor things, nothing too serious but life threatening if ignored. It would have put us out of our house since insurance wouldn’t cover it. The doctor argued with the hospital for a while to waive the bills for his care and when they wouldn’t he gave me an address and a name and told me to get there ASAP and they’ll take care of him. It turns out this guy had a whole network of people who were fed up enough that they started a sort of pro bono pediatric system. It felt like some shady back alley medical care at first having to leave my wife in the hospital to take my newborn son to get simple life saving care. Never charged us a penny and one of the guys actually pulled some string to get my sons insurance activated 3 days after he was born instead of the month we were told. We’re still paying off his bills from the hospital 3 years later for those first few hours.

          • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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            1 day ago

            I enthusiastically agree, but I would also qualify that Blair’s New Labour did their fair share of accelerating privatisation of the NHS too — it’s why I point the finger primarily at neoliberalism

            • bitjunkie@lemmy.world
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              12 hours ago

              Yeah I mean that’s similar to what we’ve got over here with the corpo Dems vs progressive caucus

        • uis@lemm.ee
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          22 hours ago

          My view is that the NHS is its knees because even a single-payer healthcare system isn’t enough to outrun market-based neoliberal economics

          *looks at decades of successful single-payer system in my country*

          My view is that the NHS is its knees because systemic dysfunction isn’t enough to outrun market-based neoliberal economics. Although systemic dysfunction and neoliberal are synonyms.

    • LandedGentry@lemmy.zip
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      18 hours ago

      That’s like 18% of the stock value at first glance. I guess it depends what you consider “not much.”

      • Loss@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        He’ll be treated like a king in prison until he’s killed by a bribed prison guard. And that’s assuming the US itself lasts long enough to enforce his sentence.

          • MrMcGasion@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            Depends on how loud we blast YMCA outside the white house. Once he gets to “dancing” (if you can call it that) who knows what he’ll do (he’ll do the double jack-off motion and probably nothing else, but I do wonder how easily he’d be to manipulate if ordinary citizens tried).

            • bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net
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              1 day ago

              We need a plant on his team, which shouldn’t be hard considering he’s forgoing the usual background checks.

        • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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          1 day ago

          Knowing how the US works, he probably won’t get to interact with humans. He’s being charged with terrorism, so they’re trying to make sure he can’t easily be accessed.

      • glimse@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        We’re talking health insurance in the US so that doesn’t change much. 3 bullets plus…20k?

    • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Not really a Return on Investment if there’s no actual “return”.

      Their valuation decreased, but none of our wallets got fatter as a result. The price tag’s number just changed.

      This by itself doesn’t really help anyone who’s struggling. It’s frustrating to see so much focus on a net worth number changing, as if that actually helps anyone.

  • Lad@reddthat.com
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    2 days ago

    “Brian helped build this company and forged deep, trusted relationships for over 20 years, and the positive impact he had on people will be felt for years to come,” Chief Financial Officer John Rex said.

    Fuck right off

  • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    It’s simply not true that Canada’s health care costs less than $63 billion. The actual number is closing in on $400 billion ($372 billion for 2024).

    And it also should be noted that there are severe problems with our health care system. Severe nursing shortages and very long wait times for a lot of critical care, long wait times to see specialists, etc.

    • YarHarSuperstar@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      That’s per year, it’s been less than 2 months since the event, the meme appears to be accurate in that way.

    • Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Our healthcare only has those problems after alot of cuts. When it used to cost more, it also used that money more efficiently and effectively. The cuts made it far worse than the respective amount of money “saved”, redistributed to worse projects is more accurate.

      • stringere@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        Costs patients that money. Real countries with real healthcare aren’t bankrupting the citizenry by extracting wealth for healthcare, that’s 'Murica, LLC.

    • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      USian here. We have nursing shortages and long wait times as well, and the private equity fucks taking over our system are always looking for ways to make it worse for more money. One thing they’ve been pushing lately is trying to widen physician/patient ratios, so that doctors spend even less time with each patient.

    • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      And a lot of it is due to conservative meddling and wanting to privatize everything. Private clinics still receive public funding… and more of it than public hospitals! This is one reason why it is getting more fucked.

      • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        There’s way more to it than that. Health care in general just costs way more now than it used to. Everyone involved has to be paid more. There’s new equipment that costs millions of dollars and new drugs that cost thousands of dollars.

        I asked my doctor about some drugs I saw being advertised on TV (while watching NFL broadcasts from the US) and he said a lot of these drugs aren’t available in Canada because they cost tens of thousands of dollars a month and our health care system simply refuses to pay for them.

      • shawn1122@lemm.ee
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        1 day ago

        Kind of, the main issue is that COVID led into boomers getting old and sick in one fell swoop. No healthcare system in the world is adequately to handle a pandemic and then aging boomer surge.

        Nurses and doctors were asked to do more than they ever have before and many just retired early or quit so there are shortages everywhere.

        The for profit aspect in the US just magnifies the issue locally.

  • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    Unfortunately thats is nothing (tho it’s 73bn I think).

    The lower price is a bit in tune with the recent market overall (-13% vs the -5ish% of the market or whatever) and its still like over 12× higher than it was 20 years ago.

    The saddest part is that what was Saint Luigi’s effect on price was prob the market expectation that one of the megacorps subsidiaries might miss their claim-denial goals to keep up appearances & marketing.

    Thats why in saying its the shareholders/capitalism that kills people, CEOs are just dogs with white collars that execute people business for their masters to appease the ever hungry money gods.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Information like this is staggering when it hits you right in the face. And yet, millions of everyday people still empathize with billionaires and giant corporations as if they’re just the guy next door on his way to work with his lunchbox, just tryin’ to keep his pickup runnin’.

    • rumba@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      e guy next door on his wa

      Well, if they work hard enough, believe enough, and pray hard enough, they might win the lottery and having those oligarch protections might come in handy.

  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Depose, deny, defend

    Think deeply about the state monopoly on violence and what purpose it serves. Consider how non-violence has been used to cull and mitigate the effectiveness of movement politics since the civil rights movement, where a class of “liberal” white moderates gets to decide what is acceptable or unacceptable as protest, while they themselves have never and will never participate in any kind of meaningful involvement to increase the sphere of rights for all people. Understand why the grievance politics of the right have been so effective at splitting the white working class from other members of the working class, that the white working class is also abused and broken to the wheel of this system, even if their critisism of it are misplaced and ill informed.