UnitedHealthcare sparks outrage after allegedly denying claim from patient in coma

UnitedHealthcare have sparked outrage after they allegedly turned down a patient's claim when they ended up in a coma.

According to the insurer's website, UnitedHealthcare Employer & Individual insurance covers more than 29 million Americans. While it covers a large amount of people in the country, UnitedHealth Group's CEO has admitted that 'the health system does not work as well as it should'.

"We understand people’s frustrations with it," said Andrew Witty after acknowledging UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson's fatal shooting on December 4.

The late businessman is thought to have made around $10 million a year.

"No one would design a system like the one we have," Witty went on. "And no one did. It’s a patchwork built over decades. Our mission is to help make it work better."

In light of 'people's frustrations' with the healthcare system in the US, a doctor has taken to social media to air his grievances about UnitedHealthcare reportedly turning down one of his patient's claims.

Dr Zachary Levy tweeted on December 31 that one of his patients who had suffered a brain hemorrhage ended up in a coma and needed to be put on a ventilator - as well as going into heart failure - and needed urgent treatment.

While the person is question was fighting for their life, UnitedHealthcare supposedly didn't deem their treatment as 'medically necessary'.

United Healthcare @UHC just denied a claim on one of my patients in the ICU with:

-- a brain hemorrhage
-- in a coma
-- on a ventilator
-- in heart failure

...because I haven't proven to them that caring for her in the hospital was "medically necessary".

Tear it all down.

— Zachary D Levy MD 🇲🇦 🇨🇮 (@ZLevyMD) December 31, 2024

"Tear it all down," Dr Levy said of this.

He further shared that he was 'instructed to write a "Letter of Medical Necessity"' to the healthcare provider, and posted a snippet of his email.

Part of it explained that the treatment was medically necessary as 'prevented them from dying during the visit'.

The email also cited that the patient had endured a brain hemorrhage, cerebral edema, and respiratory failure.

Dr Levy's initial tweet has been viewed over 21 million times on Twitter, and retweeted 65,000 times (at the time of writing). People have since shared their thoughts on the matter and echoed similar sentiments to Dr Levy.

Labeling the system as 'broken', one person wrote: "Just a reminder that United HealthGroup declared $394 billion in gross revenue last year (which was more than NVIDIA, Google, Meta, or even Apple)."

A second argued: "The US health insurance system is a big scam. Time to nationalise heath service like normal sensible countries do." And a different person added: "I work with all the insurance companies being a practitioner. I can tell you that UHC is the worst."

Meanwhile, others suggested that it might have been an admin error that the claim was denied.

Someone else said that insurance companies have 'auto denial' in a bid to get people to appeal the decision.

UHC have been accused of using AI to do this in recent years, and were hit with a class action lawsuit in 2023.

UNILAD have approached the healthcare insurer for comment.