A woman who says she used to work at UnitedHealthcare said that her supervisors would laugh when she would cry at her desk about being forced to deny claims.
Natalie Collins appeared on NewsNation Prime on Saturday after a video she made went viral on TikTok. In the original viral video, she talked about her time working as a customer service representative for UMR, a division of UnitedHealthcare. She said the company taught her "so many different ways to deny" claims.
In the original viral video, Collins talks about working at UMR for about nine months, with two to three months spent in training. The bulk of the video is about her dealing with a woman who had lost her husband to pancreatic cancer. UnitedHealthcare was refusing to pay her claims and had sued her. Collins said that the claims totaled more than $400,000, and that the company expected the client—a newly single mother with five children—to pay it. Collins said when she finally got approval to apply some funds for this case, she did so and immediately resigned.
She went into more detail about her time working at UnitedHealthcare in the Saturday night interview with NewsNation host Natasha Zouves. Collins describes being told to "get the client off the phone as fast as we could." She also says the company would use ways to reroute claims back into a processing queue to delay payment as long as possible.
"If [the client wasn't] liking what we were saying from the script, then we would just call a supervisor, and they would stand behind us. And while I was crying, they were laughing," Collins said.
"You would actually cry on the job sometimes?" Zouves asked.
"Oh my gosh, it was—it was so sad. It was so heartbreaking. I was the bad guy every single day. Does that not feel good to anyone? Like that doesn't feel good to me," Collins replied, later saying she didn't feel like she was there to help people.
"It was just a sad building all around," she said.
UnitedHealthcare's business practices have been in the news this month following the December 4 killing of the company's CEO Brian Thompson. The shooter wrote "Deny, Defend, Depose" on the empty shell casings of the bullets that killed Thompson, in an apparent reference to Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Play Claims and What You Can Do About It, a 2010 book by Jay M. Feinman about the healthcare industry. A backpack linked to the shooting was filled with Monopoly money.
The suspect in the shooting, Luigi Mangione, has pled not guilty. He faces 11 charges, including weapons charges, murder and committing a terrorist act. A recent Associated Press/NORC poll showed that 69% of adults believe that health insurance companies' policies to deny claims while making record profits was at least partially responsible for Thompson's death.
UnitedHealthcare says Mangione did not have an account with the company, according to NBC News.
