NYT: UnitedHealth Applies Legal Pressure to Try to Quiet Critics

A front-page exposé reveals UnitedHealth’s intimidation playbook against its critics.

This weekend, The New York Times gave front-page, above-the-fold attention to something many of us who work in the health care and consumer advocacy space know all too well: UnitedHealth Group — the nation’s biggest health insurer — is doing everything it can to muzzle its critics and bury uncomfortable truths about how it makes billions.

The Times investigation lays out a troubling series of intimidation and weight-throwing tactics against critics of the health insurance conglomerate. See highlights below: 

Mary Strause, a filmmaker in Wisconsin. She produced a docuseries exposing the shady practices of pharmacy benefit managers — the middlemen like Optum Rx that UnitedHealth owns. But when she logged onto Amazon to share the link, it was gone. A UnitedHealth-hired law firm reportedly had sent Amazon and Vimeo letters calling her work defamatory. Both platforms quickly pulled her film.

Adam Stone, a small-town publisher in New York, said he got a threatening letter from an Optum executive, claiming he may have committed a crime for including an audio file in a story — and demanding he destroy his reporting. 

Dr. Elisabeth Potter, a Texas surgeon who went viral when she shared how UnitedHealth reportedly interrupted her breast reconstruction surgery with a coverage call. The company’s lawyers fired off a six-page letter demanding she retract her video — while UnitedHealth quietly stopped negotiating to make her new surgery center an in-network provider. The company told the Times its decision not to include her surgery center in its provider network was unrelated to her video. She said she believes it’s retaliation.

This aggressive posture comes as UnitedHealth faces federal criminal and civil investigations into possible Medicare fraud and antitrust violations. All that and the heightened media and Congressional attention the company is receiving must surely be behind UnitedHealth’s efforts to quiet and discredit its critics, as laid out by the Times. Its own annual report even admits that “negative publicity” could have a detrimental effect on its stock price, which already has taken a major hit this year, and bring even more unwelcome scrutiny.

This is part of a growing trend among many corporations: Threaten reporters and critics with defamation suits to scare them into silence. Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, tried it when it was implicated in the opioid epidemic. But UnitedHealth’s tactics stand out for how far they reach: suing The Guardian, attempting to discredit the Wall Street Journal and intimidating doctors. And even trying to shame reporters and opinion writers who dare to mention the murder of one of its executives, suggesting that to do so while making any connection to its business practices under investigation by the feds is irresponsible.

I came out against my old industry years ago because I knew how far insurers would go to protect their profits. But the extent of this legal intimidation campaign — now laid bare on the front page of the Times — shows just how dangerous unchecked corporate power in health care has become.

Patients, doctors, taxpayers and journalists should not be bullied into silence for telling the truth. If UnitedHealth really wants to fix its reputation, it could start by fixing its business practices — not by gagging those who expose them.

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