Cyberattacks, Messaging Wars, and the Capitalist Hellscape Medicare for All

We hear it over and over again – the private sector just does it better. Whether we’re talking education or healthcare or our criminal justice system, the default Republican (and sometimes Democratic) talking point is that competition in the marketplace allows the best ideas and best people (Elon Musk, lookin at you) to rise to the top and lead us to a utopian future (sponsored by Meta).







But then something wild happens like the cyberattack on UnitedHealthcare, which is causing massive fallout throughout our healthcare system over the past two weeks – so much so, that the company appears to have paid a 22 million dollar ransom to the hackers who breached their system and now the federal department of Health and Human Services has had to bail them out. That kind of thing really makes you question how anyone is still making the argument that the private sector has this shit handled. This episode, we’re bringing in special guest and political messaging expert Jordan Berg Powers to talk about how we talk about all of this stuff: public healthcare, private corporations, and how to message our way out of the corporate hellscape in which we currently find ourselves!







Jordan Berg Powers is a consultant and the former director of Mass Alliance. Most importantly, he is coming up on 30 YEARS of experience in campaigning and organizing for progressive causes and candidates. Jordan is a return guest to the podcast, first appearing in our My Big Fat American Healthcare episode.









https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6QvGQja1N8

























Show Notes







UnitedHealthcare debacle is a little bit fun for us because we get to talk about the failures of a really shitty company, but like any healthcare debacle, there are some serious consequences. What happened here, and what does the UnitedHealth scandal look like for folks on the ground?







Starting on February 21, a group of hackers breached “Change Healthcare,” which is the largest electronic medical records and medical claims processing platform in the country. About half of all Americans’ health insurance claims pass through Change Healthcare, which was bought two years ago by UnitedHealthcare, the largest health insurer in the country.







Following the hack, Change Healthcare shut down its entire network, leading to complete mayhem in the healthcare system, which is still ongoing:









“Hospitals have been unable to check insurance benefits of in-patient stays, handle the prior authorizations needed for patient procedures and surgeries or process billing that pays for medical services. Pharmacies have struggled to determine how much to charge patients for prescriptions without access to their health insurance records, forcing some to pay for costly medications out of pocket with cash, with others unable to afford the costs.” (source)







This has led to a financial crisis for many hospitals, health clinics, physicians, and pharmacies, none of whom can be reimbursed for the care they’re providing, since they can’t submit medical claims. Provider associations are losing their shit, and the federal government has had to intervene to try to bail providers out in the meantime. 







The story keeps getting crazier and juicier: apparently UnitedHealthcare made a ransom payment of $22 million to the hackers who breached their system using BitCoin (source) - p.s. those are our healthcare premium dollars hard at work







Russian hackers may now have access to almost half the country’s medical records. I’m sure that won’t come back to haunt anyone in the years to come!









As much as we’d love to dwell on the UnitedHealthcare scandal that is unfo...