America's Health Care System DOES NOT Work

United States. This is the warning. Donald Trump is the only president in American history who openly transgressed against that oath, desecrated it when he ordered a mob to storm the capital on the day the election was to be officially certified that he lost. During his time Magazine Man of the Year interview, Donald Trump has promised to stay within the boundaries of the law. We should hope, we should pray.

Let's see. But one of the things that's broken about American politics anthus America's media, is this dogma that politics on the river of life sits at the headwaters, that it is not something that lies below the culture, for example,

and that's exactly where it lies. And some of the most out of touch people in the country are the people who are responsible for communicating to the whole of the country and image a reflection the news of what is happening in that country, the corporate leaders who make tens of millions of dollars a year, who speak in platitudes and live a life far far removed from ordinary Americans. This morning, I'm in Lake Havasu, Arizona, the west coast

of Arizona, as they like to say. I've driven across much of the country, taking the route down old Route sixty six across an international boundary in Michigan, came through Saint Louis, on through to Amarillo, Texas, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and now Lake Havasu, Arizona. These places are seldom talked about on the national news. When is the last time that Santa Fe and what's happening there was featured on national broadcast. There's an irony about this moment,

this era where everything is instantly connected. When you drive across the country and you see the trains rolling across prairies, when you see the tractor trailers forging across the plains, you see the electrical lines that before they were electrical lines, were telegraph lines, and as those telegraph lines went up, they connected the country. It was possible to know in San Francisco what had happened in New York on the same day. Ultimately, these wires were strewn across oceans. Kind

became connected. Look at this, it's the first image of the Earth, taken in nineteen forty six. This was the horizon from Alan Shepherd's first flight in nineteen sixty eight, the first time in all of humanity an image of the Earth set against the blackness of space, taken by the Apollo eight astronauts as they made their circumnavigation of

the Moon on Christmas Eve. All of this a forward momentum towards a mutual connectivity where it became possible for all of the world's people to be connected to all of the world's events at once. And so what had been a news that was parochial became instantly global, wired together, connected together by satellites above, cables below, and wires running through our daily lives, bringing the images from the street into our homes. In the world, as a shrank became

more understandable. People traveled by the thousands of first, and then tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands, and millions, and tens and hundreds of millions, and then billions of people on the move traveling around the world and yet in this Internet age, during this time where everything that is knowable can be accessed and known, the horizon inexorably shrank.

Instead of bringing the news of what's happening to all of the places in the country with the belief and conviction that every place matters, Instead, what the biggest media companies did was packaged together a very narrow slice of America and gave it to the American peace people shoved it down their throats on these panels. I've sat on a lot of them, on MSNBC, on CNN, on all

of these networks. The truth is, most of the people talking, debating, arguing live within ten to fifteen blocks of one another. They've not been to Amarillo, or to Santa Fe, or driven the highways and through the small towns that are constantly ignored. The world they live in is profoundly cloistered. And within that world there is a ranking of sorts, a hierarchy, and within it a wisdom that is so

narrow and so confined that it can become delusory. And so in this sphere of delusion there exists a culture in which a segment of the tribe is the global sea EO like Sir Andrew Whitty, chair of the United Health Group, he was United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson's boss. The assassination of CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione is not a seminal event, but rather a predictable one, and so is the reaction. And the reaction is not a particular indictment of this time, but a reaction that would

stand through all time. When power is confronted and gunned down, knifed, killed, murdered in the type of way that Brian Thompson was, it has been and always will be politicized. Luigi Mangione is a killer. He's an assassin. Let's watch Piers Morgan's finest moment with Taylor Lorenz, the disgraced internet journalist formerly of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

what Luigi Mangione is. A privileged young man with all of the opportunity in the world, struck, like many, by a mental health decline that as yet is inexplicable and unknowable, but we'll find out all of the details. And that mental health crisis saw him suffer. We know, alone, cut off from his friends and family who could not reach him, until he walked through a gateway, a portal of evil, and he killed a man, an executive who led a

company that makes billions, inflicting misery on millions. That's the business model. Now, when you pay for insurance, the expectation is when you need it, you'll have it, and the agreement will be kept. United Healthcare is notorious as a company that says no. The bullet casing left behind contained

a message, and that message is corporate strategy. It's about deny, deny, deny, and the denials inflict misery, bankruptcy, stress, pain, and a denial of care that shortens lives, makes the end of life more painful, and makes living much harder than it needs to be for ordinary Americans. Now, I have spent years of my career advising CEOs, athletes, presidents, prime ministers, senators, judges, you name it, a lot of them in crisis situations.

When you're in a crisis, when you're in a hole, the golden rule is very simple, put down the shovel and stop digging, which, if you're a leader in one of the global bullshit industries, that gets translated into stop up talking, don't move, do less, don't make the situation worse. But of course, in this era, nobody can comprehend the simple wisdom of a man like Chief Joseph, who said

speaking truth requires few words. When CEOs find themselves in a desperate space, there are a couple of predictable avenues where they can go and communicate with tremendous efficiency to the global elite, and one of those places, or the editorial pages of the nation's greatest newspapers, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Magazine, the Wall Street Journal,

and there's a few more. And so it is that Andrew Witty, who was Brian Thompson's boss at the United Healthcare Group, has gone to the pages of the New York Times, and there Andrew Whitty subjects the reader to many, many paragraphs of platitudes, platitudes about healthcare, platitudes and lies about his company, about his intentions, and about what is happening to ordinary people at the hands of his company. Now, the entire editorial is deceptive, starting with this at the beginning,

mister Andrew Witty. But that's not how he was introduced when he took over the company. The CEO of the group, this former advisor to the governor of Gangzhou, China. Yes, in the People's Republic, the communist governor of Gangzhou, China. Andrew Whitty was his advisor. Which I don't say to disparage, other than to make the point that he probably doesn't really care about the lives of ordinary Americans, because Andrew Witty is not an ordinary American, has never been an

ordinary American. He's a British subject. Sir Andrew Whitty is not an American. And so when he's dressed up like one in the New York Times, mister Andrew Whitty, and within the company he's known as Sir Andrew Whitty, it's purposeful, purposefully deceptive. It's aimed at making a connection. But the truth of the matter is, Sir Andrew makes twenty three

million dollars a year. That is three one hundred and fifty seven times more than the United Healthcare worker that he purports to speak for in this paragraph, which is an astonishment, if I may read it. The people of United Healthcare Group or nurses, doctors, patients and client advocates, technologists and more, they all come to work each day to provide health services for millions of Americans in need.

Let me just say, as a customer of United Healthcare and is somebody that has had to have a spinal fusion surgery and somebody who because of an injury, will have another back surgery. United Healthcare is a brutal, brutal company.

It is miserable to deal with. It exists in a space where it purposefully antagonizes the people that pay it money by inflicting on them an imprisonment of impossibility to ever be able to successfully navigate their labyrinth of challenges, denials, their maize, their bureaucracy of no that enriches the shareholder at the expense of the patient, serving as a type of poisonous middleman, that adds lost, that adds complexity, and

adds misery to millions and millions of people. It is the business strategy, and to pretend otherwise is to add more insult on top of the misery. The simple truth is, Sir Andrew doesn't care. And what makes that most clear are the platitudes of the New York Times editorial. Within it, there is not one sentence that acknowledges what it is that United Healthcare could do to lessen the misery it inflicts. Instead, it is calls to who knows what? I will begin reading,

but before I do, let me make this point. Nobody ever tells these people shut up, don't talk, don't do anything, announce changes. Instead, They've been conduct all their life to believe that when they open their mouth, what emerges is genius, and that all problems can be solved with the invocation of the language of corporate platitude written by some pr man overpaid to service, the dressing up of the denial of claims that are at the heart of the company's strategy.

Let me give you some examples from the piece. We know the healthcare system does not work as well as it should, and we understand people's frustrations with it. No one would design a system like the one we have, and no one did. It's a patchwork built over decades.

Our mission is to help make it work better. We are willing to partner with anyone as we always have healthcare providers, employers, patients, pharmaceutical companies, government and others to find ways to deliver high quality care and lower costs. Hit is all bullshit. The American people see it, they

understand it. The news media doesn't see it because they don't cover it, they don't comprehend it, and they don't travel to the places where the American people are because the world, as its shrunk, has become more remote and more isolated, adding to the misery. The truth of the matter is people are not alone in dealing with this company. Everybody who deals with it, from the doctor, from the nurse,

from the provider to the patient. Every part of the healthcare system, except for the bureaucracy, except for the companies, knows and disdains United Healthcare because they appreciate it for what it is. A cancer on the healthcare system. Let me keep reading. Healthcare is both intensely personal and very complicated, and the reason behind coverage decisions are not well understood.

We share there some of the responsibility for that. Together with employers, governments, and others who pay for care, we need to improve how we explain what insurance covers and how decisions are made. Behind each decision lies a comprehensive and continually updated body of clinical evidence focused on achieving the best health outcomes in ensuring patient safety. Blah blah blah blah, meaningless corporate tease and jargon. It is a lie.

While the health system is not perfect, every corner of it is filled with people who try to do their best for those they serve. Is Sir Andrew comparing himself to the brain surgeon who has spent twenty years of their lives honing an exactitude a skill. Is he comparing himself to the attention who cleans the bedpen who tends to the sores and the wounds and cleans the blood and the stains and the puke. Is he comparing himself to the labor and delivery nurse? Is he comparing himself

to the person who holds the hand of the dying patient? This, sir Andrew, who makes twenty three million dollars a year. What sir Andrew does, what his great skill is, is reading a spreadsheet. What Sir Andrew is great at doing is appreciating that the human being can be reduced to a cog, to a nothing, to a number that if enough of them can be said no to who deserve to have their treatments paid for because that's what their insurance guarantees. That he's a genius, the greatest doctor of

them all, But he's not. What he is is a global scumbag and a businessman who's been knighted because he can surf the wave of a very complicated business. Let me keep reading from his essay of platitudes. Clearly, we are not there yet. We understand and share the desire to build a healthcare system that works better for everyone. That is the purpose of our organization. No, sir Andrew, the purpose of your organization is to return shareholder profit,

and none benefit more than you do, Sir Andrew. The United States and the United Kingdom are said to share a special relationship, and Americans have a fondness for British subjects. Here's the truth. We have a lot of Brits in America, like the one running the Washington Post newsroom, doing a lot of damage to important institutions. And so when you hear Sir Andrew just because he speaks English does not make him one of us. He's not, And when he

pretends to be, it's a offensive. The truth of the matter is, and I say this as a customer of the company, it's a wretched, miserable misery machine. It does so intentionally, purposefully. Nobody who deals with United Healthcare doesn't

get it. So Sir Andrew should save his empty words and his platitudes, and Democrats should appreciate that it is time to begin to think, in this moment of defeat, about what comes next and how to talk to ordinary Americans, not in the platitude in the language of Sir Andrew, but in the plain English of men like Franklin Roosevelt. There's a lot at stake right now, and a lot of people in America really are hurting, and they fell for a lie because at least the liar had enough

interest to lie to them. Being seen is always better than being ignored, even if you're seen by the most awful amongst us. Sir Andrew somehow feels pressure. He feels like this story is about him somehow, and so he decided he would start talking, he would start dancing, he would start the jive and chuck. But it doesn't work. Maybe it does to a deluded CEO class that will call him and write them a note and say, wow, Sir Andrew, that was great. What a notp aad brilliant,

brilliant genius, What a leader you are? Might you speak at Davos? What can you tell us there, Sir Andrew? Maybe you can join a panel and talk about trust. This is the warning. I'm Steve Schmidt. This is the warning, and I invite you to join. Subscribe on our substack, on our YouTube channel, follow us. Welcome to the community.