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.

@motherskeeperdoula2023

Replying to @junedoulaservices My medical claim story with UMR. It was horrible working for them. Horrible management that were out for blood and money.

♬ original sound – Mother’s Keeper Doula

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.

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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.

Image by Tony Webster via Wikimedia Commons

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has blocked Robert Roberson, a man given a death sentence based on the discredited “shaken baby syndrome,” from testifying at the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence.

Roberson’s execution date was set for October 17, but the Texas Supreme Court granted a stay of execution so he could testify, according to the Austin Chronicle. Roberson was scheduled to testify on December 20, but Paxton filed a motion on the 19th, telling prison officials to ignore a subpoena issued by the House committee, declaring it invalid.

Roberson was due to testify about the state’s “junk science law.” That law is supposed to provide new trials when a person is convicted based on flawed forensic evidence, according to the Texas Tribune. However, critics allege the law rarely actually allows new trials, the Chronicle reports. The committee was supposed to hear Roberson’s story to help determine if the law is ineffective.

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Roberson was convicted in 2003 of capital murder following the death of his 2-year-old daughter, according to Newsweek. At the time, a doctor said the girl had died from “shaken baby syndrome,” defined as head trauma due to shaking. Shaken baby syndrome has been controversial since it was first coined. Biomechanics scientists say that shaking a baby can’t create a force strong enough to cause the type of trauma seen in these sorts of cases, according to the New Jersey Monitor. It’s often used as a catchall type diagnosis, when a baby dies but has no other signs of abuse.

In Roberson’s case, the child had been chronically ill, Newsweek reported. She had a fever and respiratory issues, which likely caused her death.

Other cases based on shaken baby syndrome have been overturned. This includes a 2000 case in Dallas, where Andrew Wayne Roark was initially sentenced to 35 years in prison in the death of his girlfriend’s 13-month-old. The Texas Supreme Court overturned Roark’s conviction this year about a week before Roberson was due to be executed, according to KERA-FM.

Despite this, Texas officials have declined to address Roberson’s case. Though Gov. Greg Abbott pardoned four people this week, Roberson was not one of them, according to the Houston Chronicle. In October, Paxton called attempts to delay Roberson’s execution “eleventh-hour, one-sided, extrajudicial stunts that attempt to obscure the facts and rewrite his past,” according to the Tribune. At the time, Abbott agreed, saying the House had “stepped out of line” in its attempts to delay execution so Roberson could testify.

Last year, Paxton was impeached by the state House on 20 separate articles of impeachment. The Texas Senate, which skews Republican 19 to 12, voted to acquit. The charges mostly centered around allegations Paxton used his position to help a campaign donor under investigation by the FBI for fraud.

A new date for Roberson’s execution has not been set.

Image via Shutterstock

Ohio Senator JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate, said Monday that if he were in former Vice President Mike Pence’s place, he would not have certified the election on January 6, 2021.

Speaking as part of a panel on the All-In Podcast, Vance told cohost Jason Calacanis the issue wasn’t necessarily Pence deciding not to “overturn the election results,” but rather that “Mike Pence could have done more to sort of surface some problems.”‘

Calacanis replied by asking Vance directly if he would have certified the election.

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“I happen to think that there were issues back in 2020, particularly in Pennsylvania. Even some of the courts that refused to throw out certified ballots did say that there were ballots that were cast in an illegal way. They just refused to actually decertify the election results in Pennsylvania,” Vance said. “Do I think that we could have had a much more rational conversation about how to ensure that only legal ballots are cast? Yes. And do I think that Mike Pence could have played a better role? Yes.”

Calacanis asked Vance again if he’d have certified the election, and Vance appears to back the plan to send fake electors to cause confusion in the certification process.

“I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we have. That’s what I would have done,” Vance said. “The important part is we would have had a big debate. And it doesn’t necessarily mean the results would have been any different, but we would, at least, have had the debate in Pennsylvania and Georgia about how to better have a rational election system where legal ballots are cast.”

Democrats heavily criticized Vance’s statement.

“Donald Trump picked JD Vance as his running mate because he knows that Vance will do what his last vice president wouldn’t—undermine our democracy and help him try to overturn election results. Now, Vance is making it clear: instead of certifying the 2020 election, Vance ‘would have asked the states’ to send slates of fake electors and throw our election into chaos to help Trump stay in power. Vance is clearly laying out the stakes of this election for our democracy and our basic freedoms, and showing voters that if given the chance, he’ll try to replace the rule of law with the rule of Trump,” Alex Floyd, the rapid response director for the DNC, said in a statement.

Vance’s claims of there being illegal ballots in Pennsylvania appears to be based on a claim from former President Donald Trump in 2022. Trump said that a then-recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that ballots sent in undated envelopes will not be counted in that year’s election meant that the 2020 election was “rigged, but they’ll let that result stand.”

The Associated Press debunked Trump’s claim, reporting that not only did Trump misrepresent the court’s ruling, but even if his claim was accurate, throwing out these ballots would not have mattered in the election.