Medical Information

  Above the Fold We Need to Nationalize to Prevent Fraud Apr 15, 2025 By MATTHEW HOLT Two weeks ago I wrote an  April Fool’s piece that claimed that Elon Musk and DOGE were going to nationalize American health care  to save some money. That piece was half-joking but full-serious.  If you look at what Musk is complaining about there are two major areas of “waste, fraud and abuse” in government spending.  One is people directly employed by government agencies. Most of the people I’ve ever met in government work damn hard and for much less money than they’d get in the private sector. But you can of course find stories about  useless government bureaucrats, who don’t do any work and pad their expense accounts . Those stories are probably about as true as  Reagan’s pink Cadillac driving welfare queen  in that there is some basis in reality for there being a tiny minority of bad actors, but the politics has far outrun the truth. (BTW that Welfare Queen ...

  Above the Fold Bloom is Off the Rose at UnitedHealth Group Apr 29, 2025 By JEFF GOLDSMITH A Forty Year Growth Saga is Coming to an End After market close Wednesday April 16, UnitedHealth Group reported its First Quarter 2025 earnings. UNH missed their expected 1Q earnings by 9 cents a share, but the firm also lowered its full year 2025 earnings estimate by 12%. On Thursday opening, investors reacted with an unbridled fury, and stripped UNH of more than a hundred billion in market capitalization in a matter of hours. In the glare of hindsight, UNH was priced for perfection at a pre-crash trailing Price Earnings ratio of 38, six points higher than Amazon and eight points higher than Microsoft, which might account for the savagery of the correction. Definitive answers to the question–what is happening to United’s sprawling mass of businesses–are impossible because the company is an $400 billion black box. The main United businesses–health insurance, care delivery, pharmacy benefits ...