insurance

A sobering week

Hyacinth Empinado/STAT

UnitedHealth Group, the largest health care company in America, was ready for its annual investor conference in New York City last Wednesday. But executives abruptly canceled it after the company found out UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed that same morning. 

My colleague Tara Bannow and I were watching the live stream of the conference when the news of Thompson’s death started to trickle in. The killer still has not been caught, as of this past weekend, and the attack has raised questions about security moving forward. 

Thompson’s killing has turned out to be a defining moment in the zeitgeist of American health care. The shooting shows a callous disregard for someone’s life, another gun death in a country that’s filled with them. It also opened the floodgates for an outpouring of rage and resentment, where social media posts have ranged from mournful to apathetic to joyful. 

The common thread was unmistakable: The populace is fed up with the current health care system — one that charges people the highest prices in the world, erects financial and bureaucratic barriers to getting care, and has plunged millions of people into debt. As Yolonda Wilson, an associate professor of health care ethics at Saint Louis University, told Tara, many reactions weren’t just fed by anger. “I think it’s pain,” she said. “I think a lot of people have pent-up pain, and they haven’t had a place to put it.” Read more from Tara and me.

antitrust

Gail Slater, Trump’s replacement for Jonathan Kanter

Big news for health insurers and other health care companies that want to get sign-offs on future deals from the Department of Justice: President-elect Trump said he will name Gail Slater as the agency’s top antitrust official, replacing Jonathan Kanter. 

Slater, an economic policy adviser for Vice President-elect J.D. Vance in the Senate, has been critical of Big Tech companies. What’s less clear are her views of the health care industry. 

She spent 10 years at the Federal Trade Commission, including three as an adviser to Democratic Commissioner Julie Brill during the Obama administration — so she has antitrust chops. Her name appeared on one brief tied to when the FTC sued to block a hospital system in Georgia from buying a nearby competitor. The most salient questions include how Slater will proceed with the DOJ’s investigation into UnitedHealth and its challenge of UnitedHealth’s acquisition of a home health and hospice giant.

the courts

Voldemort, home health kingpin?

Speaking of DOJ: Before the agency sued to block UnitedHealth’s $3.3 billion takeover of Amedisys, the merging parties tried to appease regulators by selling off some home health and hospice businesses to a company called VitalCaring Group. But VitalCaring is ensnared in quite the legal mess. 

A ruling last week from Delaware’s Court of Chancery is making the owners of VitalCaring fork over 43% of profits to Encompass Health “due to the willful misconduct that produced VitalCaring.” Encompass was originally founded by April Anthony. But it turns out she and some private equity partners were building VitalCaring, a competitor to Encompass, while she was still CEO of Encompass. And everything was kept hush-hush.

“Documents were exchanged on the golf course or through webs of lawyers. Code names like ‘Voldemort’ referred to Anthony in written correspondence,” the ruling reads. “A sham employee recruitment process was used to create a paper trail. Records showing Anthony’s involvement were deleted or scrubbed.” Yep: They gave her an alias tied to “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” to conceal her involvement. This is a pretty wild story that also happens to paint an unsavory picture of private equity’s goal to cash out quickly in the home health space. Read the opinion.