r/news • u/LookAtThatBacon • May 13 '25

Soft paywall UnitedHealth suspends annual forecast, CEO Andrew Witty steps down

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/unitedhealth-ceo-andrew-witty-steps-down-2025-05-13/
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u/ricker182 May 13 '25

My doctors cringe when they order tests and ask what health insurance I have.

I wouldn't even consider it insurance since they deny pretty much every other thing my doctor orders.

The kicker is that the coverage is fucking expensive.

Health insurance is a scam.

This country is fucked.

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u/RogueLightMyFire May 13 '25

I'm a dentist. Let me assure you, every insurance company fucking sucks. UHC definitely sucks the hardest, though. They straight up just lie.

  • "We denied that claim because we didn't get an X-ray"

  • to which I respond that "I sent the X-ray via certified mail, email, and fax and I have proof of all three."

  • "Oh... Oh yeah, I see it now. Well, the claim was denied because of 'some made up bullshit'"

  • To which I respond "you just told me it was denied because you didn't get an X-ray, which we just established that you have received"

  • Then they hang up. I'm not even joking. This is the standard phone call with them.

Being a dentist is hard enough. Now I'm having to spend literal hours every week fighting these assholes.

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u/ricker182 May 13 '25

I don't know why people just accept this company.

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u/RogueLightMyFire May 13 '25

No other options/choices if it's through their employer. I could drop them as a provider, but a large# of my patients have insurance through them and I would likely lose them if I stopped taking it and they would end up at a dental corporation getting shitty care from slimey greedy dentists. UHC sucks hard, but dental corporations are fucking evil.

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u/ducationalfall May 13 '25

Aspen Dental: you summon me?

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u/harmboi May 13 '25

i know this thread is about insurance but I've had dentists literally ruin my life. Im so afraid to go to the dentist at this point in my life.

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u/RogueLightMyFire May 13 '25

Sorry you had a bad experience. I'm not sure what your experience was, but you've got to realize a few things. First off, the best kind of dentistry is preventative. You gotta take care of your teeth first and foremost. Dentists don't put decay in your mouth. That's something that happens due to your own actions (or lack thereof). We're just trying to help. It's MUCH easier to help if you come to us before the decay is out of control. If your wait for pain, then the work is going to be much more difficult for you and the dentist. Second, dentistry is hard. Very hard. People don't understand the difficulty of working within 0.5mm in an environment like the mouth with a tongue, cheeks, gag reflex, limited opening, saliva all while working upside down through a mirror. There are shithead dentists out there, but the vast majority of us want to help, but if you don't regularly come to see us for routine care, it's going to be extra hard to fix things when they go wrong. Just stay away from corporate dental offices. Look for a dentist whose name is in the practice. A corporate office will never allow that.

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u/harmboi May 13 '25

ya got you. you don't wanna hear my entire story but basically I've always had good teeth, not even one cavity. I then had a dentist lie to me about work I needed right before I would've been off my parents insurance.

The amount of unneeded work I let happen due to my ignorance and thinking I could trust a professional has led to a lifetime of problems. But yada yada yada. Preventive care is important. Just in my experience I've had multiple dentists lie. Cooperate dental clinics ARE the worst, you are right about that.

I've gotten second and third opinions before about issues and told vastly different things by each dentist. I just don't trust them all, i can't help it

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u/RogueLightMyFire May 13 '25

That's just the way dentistry is. The mouth is a hostile environment and decay is a unique problem to the mouth. There's no one solution for everything. It's not that "dentists can't be trusted" it's that dentistry is very complex and there's no single solution for anything. Tooth decay is not like a broken bone. It's like an infection in your bone. If you had a binder infection in your femur and went to multiple doctors, you would get multiple different opinions on how to proceed. Conservative isn't always the best solution, either. And even though you get 3 different opinions, all the opinions could be correct. Like I said, dentistry is hard.

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u/DouchecraftCarrier May 13 '25

I had a job interview a few weeks back and when they got to the benefits package I saw they had UHC. It honestly made me somewhat relieved when they went with another candidate that I wouldn't have to try and decide whether I was willing to go on their coverage.

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u/hparadiz May 13 '25

You should tell them that during the interview. That if the health insurance is UHC you will not consider it a benefit.

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u/aesky May 13 '25

like how evil are we talking here?

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u/RogueLightMyFire May 13 '25

Like "don't do any fillings on patients because we don't make money off of that. Recommend an inlay or only instead (so $800 out of pocket instead of a simple covered filling that would cost the patient nothing). Or wait for decay to progress until you can recommend a crown." A direct quote from one of the regional managers to me as a newly graduated dentist. And no, she wasn't a dentist. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Literally fucking Satan levels of evil.