Check again. The Optum unit of UnitedHealth Group has huge revenue from software and technical services. If just that part of the business was spun out it would be one of the top 20 US tech companies.
What a lot of people don't realize is that it's mostly employer HR departments running the "death panels". UHG and its competitors would be happy to sell insurance policies that cover absolutely everything with no questions asked: this would be easier for them to administer without the hassles of utilization management and claim edits. But customers — mainly large employers — demand that insurers (or third-party administrators) impose more restrictive coverage rules in order to hold down medical costs.
Ultimately there will always be some healthcare rationing. This happens in every country. For example, the UK NHS has death panels which decide that certain treatments won't be covered at all because they're not cost effective. Resources are limited and demand is effectively infinite. So the only real question is how we do the rationing.
> UHG and its competitors would be happy to sell insurance policies that cover absolutely everything with no questions asked...But customers — mainly large employers — demand that insurers (or third-party administrators) impose more restrictive coverage rules in order to hold down medical costs.
UHG has been caught denying claims for things that employers already paid them to cover for their employees. You can't blame HR departments for that. You also can't blame HR for UHG upcoding/overbilling which eats into the limited resources of hospitals and the limited resource of taxpayer money ultimately resulting in fewer people able to get the healthcare they need just so that UHG can line their own pockets.
While HR departments do have their own issues, they're nowhere near the level of pure evil that UHG is.
FWIW, when working at a major Silicon Valley tech company in the mid 2010s, my team made significant contributions to OSS projects including OpenStack and the Linux kernel as a core part of our work for Walmart.
The work to upstream our changes was included in the Statements of Work which Walmart signed off on, and our time spent on those efforts was billed to them.
The stats for those projects will have recorded my former employer as the direct source of those contributions - but they wouldn't have existed had it not been for Walmart.
