• Encore! EP384: How Shareholders Impact Carrier Behavior, Exactly and Specifically, With Wendell Potter

  • 2025/02/06
  • 再生時間： 35 分
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Encore! EP384: How Shareholders Impact Carrier Behavior, Exactly and Specifically, With Wendell Potter

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  • I am drowning in all things Q1 right now. So, this week we’re going with an encore. But this is a great show to go back and reflect upon, as it’s about carriers and how shareholders impact the actions of said carriers. For a full transcript of this episode, click here. If you enjoy this podcast, be sure to subscribe to the free weekly newsletter to be a member of the Relentless Tribe. And, yeah, I think it’s always been pretty clear heretofore that for shareholders, I don’t know, money is the mission. Brian Klepper, PhD, said that the other day in a different context, but yeah. And there’s a certain amount of okay about that. Like, the finance person in charge of ensuring the pension fund doesn’t run out of money for retirees. Right? Money is the mission, or the family office can continue for another generation. Money is the mission. Like, there’s a very vested interest in what amounts to profiteering. And if the business sells handbags or computer chips, I don’t know, profiteering is probably fine. No one blinks an eye about putting profits before, like, shoppers or profits before other businesses in the supply chain. But this is healthcare that we’re talking about, and patient lives are the product. And again, there just doesn’t seem to have been very many conversations about a distinction between what might be okay when the product is a handbag that might not be okay when the product is caring for human beings. This being said, I want to bring up an interesting caveat to this whole discussion and actually one reason I decided to encore the show with Wendell Potter from 2022. I’m gonna read a very well put post in LinkedIn by Richard Staynings, and he wrote this in mid-January 2025. Here’s the post: “UnitedHealth Group in the cross-hairs—not by patients and regulators but shareholders. … On Wednesday, UHG shareholders requested the company prepare a report on the costs and public health impact related to UnitedHealth’s practices that limit or delay access to healthcare. “The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), a group representing faith-based shareholders, said it has filed a shareholder petition requesting the company to review how often prior authorization requirements and denials of coverage … lead to patients postponing or forsaking medical treatment as well as serious adverse events for individuals.” Wendell Potter, by the way, my guest today, commented on that press release. As interesting as the post itself, I found the comments on the post and kind of, you know, curbing enthusiasm with a dose of realism on those comments. George Mathew, MD, MBA, FACP, who also was on the podcast a couple of years ago (EP253), he commented, “Many of the large shareholders [at these carriers] may work at [UHC, and] they may vote against this type of transparency.” That is very thought provoking to see, actually, if the C-suite at these companies is more or less committed to patients/members than their shareholders. This podcast with Wendell Potter was recorded well prior to any shareholder uprising, however. Now, I do want to say this next part, and I’m gonna mention, coming up is a show with Vivian Ho, PhD, about the sky-high hospital prices being a big culprit for the high premiums that many American workers are saddled with. And that matters because, here’s the sentence that absolutely must be said: The problems with healthcare in this country and why some people call it the healthcare industrial complex, it’s a problem with the whole healthcare marketplace, not just one stakeholder. It’s everybody in concert doing some not great stuff, egged on by shareholders and professional capital and boards of directors, not one villain in a black hat tying someone to train tracks, like in some kind of talkie. Right? The problems that we have today are a confluence of a whole lot of folks, working at a whole bunch of different places, taking advantage of a whole lot of perverse incentives. So, with that, this is a really interesting encore. As I said again, please do listen to it. Here’s a Milton Friedman quote: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it [that entity] stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” Okay, so this is Friedman, Milton Friedman, pretty much the most influential advocate of free market capitalism, stating quite clearly that an entity’s greatest responsibility lies in the satisfaction of its shareholders. His nod to social responsibility or ethics of any kind comes at the end there, where he says that for free market capitalism to function, there must be open and free competition and no fraud. So, let’s compare this to what’s going on in the payer space in the healthcare industry. First off, there was just a chart in the New York ...
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あらすじ・解説

I am drowning in all things Q1 right now. So, this week we’re going with an encore. But this is a great show to go back and reflect upon, as it’s about carriers and how shareholders impact the actions of said carriers. For a full transcript of this episode, click here. If you enjoy this podcast, be sure to subscribe to the free weekly newsletter to be a member of the Relentless Tribe. And, yeah, I think it’s always been pretty clear heretofore that for shareholders, I don’t know, money is the mission. Brian Klepper, PhD, said that the other day in a different context, but yeah. And there’s a certain amount of okay about that. Like, the finance person in charge of ensuring the pension fund doesn’t run out of money for retirees. Right? Money is the mission, or the family office can continue for another generation. Money is the mission. Like, there’s a very vested interest in what amounts to profiteering. And if the business sells handbags or computer chips, I don’t know, profiteering is probably fine. No one blinks an eye about putting profits before, like, shoppers or profits before other businesses in the supply chain. But this is healthcare that we’re talking about, and patient lives are the product. And again, there just doesn’t seem to have been very many conversations about a distinction between what might be okay when the product is a handbag that might not be okay when the product is caring for human beings. This being said, I want to bring up an interesting caveat to this whole discussion and actually one reason I decided to encore the show with Wendell Potter from 2022. I’m gonna read a very well put post in LinkedIn by Richard Staynings, and he wrote this in mid-January 2025. Here’s the post: “UnitedHealth Group in the cross-hairs—not by patients and regulators but shareholders. … On Wednesday, UHG shareholders requested the company prepare a report on the costs and public health impact related to UnitedHealth’s practices that limit or delay access to healthcare. “The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), a group representing faith-based shareholders, said it has filed a shareholder petition requesting the company to review how often prior authorization requirements and denials of coverage … lead to patients postponing or forsaking medical treatment as well as serious adverse events for individuals.” Wendell Potter, by the way, my guest today, commented on that press release. As interesting as the post itself, I found the comments on the post and kind of, you know, curbing enthusiasm with a dose of realism on those comments. George Mathew, MD, MBA, FACP, who also was on the podcast a couple of years ago (EP253), he commented, “Many of the large shareholders [at these carriers] may work at [UHC, and] they may vote against this type of transparency.” That is very thought provoking to see, actually, if the C-suite at these companies is more or less committed to patients/members than their shareholders. This podcast with Wendell Potter was recorded well prior to any shareholder uprising, however. Now, I do want to say this next part, and I’m gonna mention, coming up is a show with Vivian Ho, PhD, about the sky-high hospital prices being a big culprit for the high premiums that many American workers are saddled with. And that matters because, here’s the sentence that absolutely must be said: The problems with healthcare in this country and why some people call it the healthcare industrial complex, it’s a problem with the whole healthcare marketplace, not just one stakeholder. It’s everybody in concert doing some not great stuff, egged on by shareholders and professional capital and boards of directors, not one villain in a black hat tying someone to train tracks, like in some kind of talkie. Right? The problems that we have today are a confluence of a whole lot of folks, working at a whole bunch of different places, taking advantage of a whole lot of perverse incentives. So, with that, this is a really interesting encore. As I said again, please do listen to it. Here’s a Milton Friedman quote: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it [that entity] stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” Okay, so this is Friedman, Milton Friedman, pretty much the most influential advocate of free market capitalism, stating quite clearly that an entity’s greatest responsibility lies in the satisfaction of its shareholders. His nod to social responsibility or ethics of any kind comes at the end there, where he says that for free market capitalism to function, there must be open and free competition and no fraud. So, let’s compare this to what’s going on in the payer space in the healthcare industry. First off, there was just a chart in the New York ...
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