HEALTH

Consumer Afairs -  UnitedHealth Group has agreed to pay $69 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused the company of breaching fiduciary duties under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974. The lawsuit, filed in April 2021, claimed that UnitedHealth kept poorly performing target-date funds, specifically the Wells Fargo Target Fund Suite, on its 401(k) investment menu. The plaintiffs argued that UnitedHealth’s decision was influenced by its financial relationship with Wells Fargo. 

 Mad in America -  In a new study, Anna Katie Jones and Tanya Lecchi from the Metanoia Institute in London explore how social class disparities affect working-class clients in therapy. Their research highlights how therapeutic spaces, often designed with middle- and upper-class norms, can inadvertently alienate working-class clients, exacerbating feelings of disconnection and mistrust. The findings call for a greater focus on social class within psychological training and interventions, urging clinicians to address class differences openly to foster trust and engagement.

NBC News - Today, an estimated 40-plus percent of the country’s hospital emergency departments are overseen by for-profit health care staffing companies owned by private equity firms, academic research, regulatory filings and internal documents show. Two of the largest, according to their websites and news releases, are Envision Healthcare, owned by KKR, and TeamHealth, of the Blackstone Group. EmCare, the health care staffing company that managed Brovont, is part of Envision. 

Private equity firms have taken over a broad swath of health care entities in recent years. They use large amounts of debt to acquire companies, aiming to increase their profits quickly so they can resell them at gains in a few years. 

There’s a reason private equity firms have invested in companies staffing hospital emergency departments, said Richard M. Scheffler, a professor of health economics and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “The money in the hospital is in the ER,” he said. “It is the biggest net generator and a huge profit center for almost all hospitals.” The problem, he said, is that “ER doctors are being told how to practice medicine” by financial managers. 

 I Was a Health Insurance Executive. What I Saw Made Me Quit.