Baby Bell All Over Again

UnitedHealth controls both sides of the healthcare table. They sell you insurance while owning the doctors you go to. They dictate the prices, the diagnoses, and the flow of money. That is not healthcare. That is vertical integration dressed up as convenience.

Pat Ryan just put a bill on the table to split it apart. Insurers would not be allowed to gobble up medical practices. Insurance arms would have to separate from provider arms. Why? Because patients in Ryan’s district complain about delays, denials, and a system designed to profit from confusion.

UnitedHealth pays its own practices more than independents. That rigs the market. It also nudges doctors toward coding tricks that maximize chronic disease payments from Medicare. Translation: more money for them, less focus on acute care when you need it most.

This bill matters because it forces daylight into the system. UnitedHealth owns Optum, which employs tens of thousands of doctors. If you are an independent provider, you cannot compete. If you are a patient, you cannot escape. The choice disappears. The costs rise. The care quality drops. And the corporation wins.

The monopoly playbook is older than the VHS tapes still sitting in your parents’ basement. Oil companies ran it. Telecom ran it. Now healthcare runs it. Patients get squeezed while the boardroom cashes out.

Splitting insurance from providers is the only way to test if care can exist without being cross-subsidized by profit games. Independent clinics might survive again. Patients might get a fair appointment without an incentive structure tied to Wall Street.

This is what a patient lobby would fight for every day. Laws that stop consolidation. Laws that defend patients from becoming billing codes in someone else’s quarterly earnings report.

SOURCE ➡️ https://www.statnews.com/2025/09/17/unitedhealth-breakup-targeted-new-proposed-law-pat-ryan/