And we have more on the Change hack today, with @moetkacik delving into the history of UnitedHealth's monopolization of key pieces of medical infrastructure, & how that by itself badly damaged health care in America:https://t.co/JBKlGE1ZMB
— David Dayen (@ddayen) March 11, 2024
Last Thursday, the medical colossus UnitedHealthcare applied for an emergency exemption that would fast-track its takeover of a medical practice in Corvallis, Oregon, in a letter warning regulators that the practice might close its doors if the merger were not approved right away.
Although the specific reason for the exemption request is redacted from the publicly posted version of the application, a clinic insider says the “emergency” is the same one that has plunged thousands of other health providers across the nation into a terrifying cash crunch: the weeks-long outage of UnitedHealth’s Change Healthcare clearinghouse and claims processing systems, which has halted the flow of information that enables physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers to get paid for their work.
“Our claims processing goes through [Change], so all of a sudden there was no money coming in,” the insider, an employee of The Corvallis Clinic who did not want to be identified for fear of jeopardizing the transaction, told the Prospect. The clinic’s shareholders, who include include more than half of its 110 physicians and one of its behavioral health providers, worked without pay last week in order to “scrape together enough money to pay the staff,” the insider said, but on Thursday the shareholders explained that they weren’t sure they would be able to open the doors Monday without an emergency cash injection. “They’re praying that the sale’s going to go through and that Optum will front them the money.”
https://prospect.org/health/2024-03-10-unitedhealth-exploits-emergency-change-ransomware-oregon/