UnitedHealth Grapples With Communications During Hack Crisis Some medical providers say they have been ignored, others pressured to make positive statements
By James Rundle and Kim S. Nash | Wall Street Journal April 3, 2024
As Minnesota physicians clinic operators teeter on the brink of closure because of UnitedHealth Group’s delayed emergency fund payments in the wake of the cyberattack on UnitedHealth Group’s Change Healthcare, Minnesota physicians across the state—and nationwide—continue to escalate their calls for help.
This April 3rd Wall Street Journal article about the scope and scale of intimidation, coercion and harrassment follow. (*Subscription required.)
Editor’s note: After this editor contacted Eric Hausman at Optum directly, Ms. Benson stopped receiving emails and calls from his team. “Communications” is not the issue. UHG is deliberately delaying payments.
Andrew Witty will testify before the United States Congress on April 30th. His companies are currently being investigated by the United States Department of Justice for an array of ongoing White Collar Crimes.
At the very beginning, though, some providers say they had no official information.
Emily Benson, a therapist from Edina, Minn., said she started to get help after she was featured in a March 15 article about the outage in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
“As soon as that article broke, all of a sudden I got a call from United, and my phone started blowing up,” she said.
Then she began receiving emails and phone messages from Optum’s communications department. The voice mails, some of which have been reviewed by the Journal, asked her to make statements on social media or talk to journalists about the help she has received from the company.
Benson said she is angry and stressed by the requests. “You want me to sing your praises? I don’t think so,” she said.
Hausman, the UnitedHealth spokesman, acknowledged the outreach.
“In a small number of cases, we asked providers who received funds if they would be willing to help alert other providers of available funding. Our goal has always been to help get the word out to as many providers as possible,” he said.
Read the full feature in the Wall Street Journal.