09/22/2026
John Oliver’s takedown of UnitedHealth Group exposes more than one predatory corporation. It exposes the fatal arithmetic of for-profit healthcare. Every premium dollar diverted to executive compensation, consultants, advertising, sales commissions, redundant databases, corporate real estate, lobbying, profits, and shareholder returns is a dollar unavailable for medical care. Doctors and hospitals then spend still more money hiring armies of employees to navigate different formularies, networks, billing codes, prior-authorization rules, appeals, and denial systems. Private insurance does not eliminate administration; it duplicates it throughout the system and forces patients to finance every layer.
The arithmetic indicts the model. A universal public insurer needs one enrollment system, one claims framework, and one risk pool. A multipayer system finances those functions repeatedly across competing companies while also paying executives, advertisers, consultants, lobbyists, and shareholders.
Providers pay the duplication tax too. Medical practices must verify eligibility, determine network status, obtain prior authorization, submit insurer-specific claims, correct rejections, and contest denials. That labor raises the price of care without treating a single patient.
Denials produce revenue. Premiums enter an insurer as income; medical claims leave as expenses. That accounting reality rewards delay, restriction, narrow networks, aggressive utilization review, and denial—even when corporate language disguises those practices as “care management.”
Medicare Advantage disproves the privatization sales pitch. MedPAC projects that Medicare will pay private Medicare Advantage plans $76 billion more in 2026 than comparable coverage would cost in Traditional Medicare. The plans report that administration and profit consume 13% of their bids.
Drug profiteering follows the same script. Taxpayers finance foundational science through the NIH and public universities, then pharmaceutical corporations acquire market power, impose monopoly prices, and return the proceeds to investors. A peer-reviewed study connected NIH-funded research to every new drug approved from 2010 through 2016.
This system does not fail because executives misunderstand healthcare. It functions according to capitalist incentives: maximize revenue, minimize payouts, consolidate power, and deliver returns to investors. Humane healthcare requires the opposite mandate—cover everyone, treat illness promptly, and direct healthcare dollars toward healthcare. Medicare for All would not create the need to finance care; Americans already finance it. It would stop forcing them to finance an extractive corporate apparatus on top of it.
With Luigi Mangione’s upcoming sentencing, John Oliver devotes the ...
