The boss of the recently murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson broke his silence to pay tribute to his slain colleague and acknowledge flaws in the US healthcare system.

In a New York Times op-ed yesterday, Andrew Witty, the CEO of the insurer’s parent company, UnitedHealth Group, expressed grief for Thompson, whom he praised as a talented leader who strove to benefit patients.

But he called the US healthcare system “a patchwork built over decades,” and wrote that he wants to work with providers, the government, and patients to improve it. While claiming that coverage decisions are based on clinical evidence, Witty admitted that the reasoning behind them is “not well understood” by patients.

However, in an internal message shared after Thompson’s murder, Witty said UnitedHealthcare would keep pushing back on “unsafe” or “unnecessary care,” alluding to coverage denials, which the industry views as a check on providers.

Lightning rod

Thompson’s murder unleashed an outpouring of vitriol from Americans accusing insurers of Kafka-esque coverage denials and calling out the massive paychecks of insurance CEOs. Some even simped for the suspect, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, who derided the American healthcare system in a manifesto. UnitedHealthcare has been criticized for using AI to deny Medicare claims for rehabilitation care.

Proliferating threats to other industry executives have prompted insurers to take security precautions—like removing top brass bios from their websites—and some are reportedly waiting for the dust to settle before commenting on Thompson’s killing or the state of the industry.

But the Economist argues the ire might be misdirected: While insurers often overreach in claim denial, the problem stems more from market pressure to make a profit in a relatively low-margin industry amid ballooning healthcare costs. And US healthcare is remarkably expensive due to factors including costly administration, providers overprescribing treatments, opaque hospital pricing, and a doctor shortage.

Paradoxically…eight out of 10 Americans rate their personal plan as “good” or “excellent,” a 2023 survey by health policy nonprofit KFF showed, though almost 60% said they had a problem with their coverage in the past year.—SK

RFK Jr.’s lawyer asked the government to revoke approval of the polio vaccine. Aaron Siri, a lawyer and close ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services), filed a petition in 2022 that asked the FDA to revoke its approval for an updated polio vaccine because it wasn’t studied against a placebo, the NYT reported. The prospect of pulling the polio vaccine unnerves public health leaders, who credit it with protecting Americans against a disease that once killed or paralyzed more than 500,000 people globally each year. Thanks to the vaccine, which was first introduced in the US in 1955, natural polio transmission was eliminated in 1979.

McKinsey agrees to $650 million settlement over opioids work. The consulting giant will pay $650 million as part of a settlement with the DOJ over its work with Purdue Pharma, which produced the OxyContin painkiller at the heart of the opioid epidemic. McKinsey was paid more than $93 million by Purdue over 15 years, during which it advised the pharma company to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin. McKinsey said it was “deeply sorry for our past client service to Purdue Pharma” and it “will always be a source of profound regret for our firm.” A former senior partner also agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice because he deleted internal docs after learning about probes into Purdue.

The Army–Navy game will be a football, and political, spectacle. The 125th meeting between the two military programs in Maryland today is going to be an even bigger event than usual. President-elect Trump will be in attendance, along with VP-elect JD Vance (and his guest, Daniel Penny), Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and former Army Major Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Defense secretary. The game, which typically sells out in April, plays an outsized role in each school’s athletic budgets: Navy’s athletic director told Sportico the Army–Navy game alone could account for 15% of its annual operating budget.—NF

Nvidia is reluctantly pulling up a chair at the grown-ups table for the newest member of the $1 trillion club: under-the-radar tech giant Broadcom. On the back of an accrescent AI boom, it hit a $1 trillion market cap yesterday for the first time after reporting stellar Q4 earnings.

Readers, meet Broadcom. Broadcom supplies AI chips to Big Tech companies, sort of like Nvidia but with a little less star power (for now). The company has a foothold in hardware and software, but its booming semiconductor business fueled its stock pop of 24% yesterday to hit the milestone.

• AI revenue jumped 220% to $12.2 billion this year.
• CEO Hock Tan expects the market for AI chips and its corresponding hardware to reach $90 billion by 2027.

Will it stay up? Broadcom said it won two big hyperscaler customers (aka companies that require large-scale data centers) and expects fiscal Q1 revenue of $14.6 billion, slightly ahead of estimates. But it could potentially lose customers as more tech giants, like one of its main customers, Apple, decide to produce AI chips internally.

Rising tides lift all boats? Shares of fellow chipmakers Nvidia and AMD fell yesterday, which Wall Street analysts speculate could be due to concerns they’ll lose market share to Broadcom.—CC

To counter a swift decline in new babies, the most populated city in the world will give some of its residents a four-day workweek in hopes that they’ll get busy, the Financial Times reported this week.

Starting in April, Japan’s 160,000+ government employees will be able to take an extra day off of their choosing each week, which Tokyo hopes will force flexibility into its grueling work culture and enable more women to choose both career and family.

Japan is going on its 16th straight year of population decline. And with the world’s highest ratio of elderly-to-non-elderly people, the country is struggling to plug gaps in its labor force. Despite yearslong attempts to boost babymaking via tax breaks, more daycare facilities, and even a government-made dating app...

• Japan is expected to welcome less than 700,000 newborns this year for the first time since at least 1899, when these records began.
• Japan’s birth rate dipped to 1.2 babies per woman last year, according to Japan’s health ministry. Generally, that rate needs to be 2.1 for a population to remain stable.

Elsewhere in East Asia…South Korea is paying men to undo their vasectomies and plans to spend $322 million on reversing its loneliness epidemic. Its fertility rate was 0.72 last year, the lowest in the world.—ML

Yesterday, the memecoin fartcoin topped a market cap of $700 million, making it worth more than a bunch of US publicly traded firms. The digital token, based on the Solana blockchain, has jumped ~200% in the past week amid a resurgence of interest in memecoins since the election. If you’re thinking, “This has got to be a joke”...well, it is a joke, and that’s the whole point: Memecoins trade on attention and virality. When people post, speculators buy.

However, fartcoin and other memecoins have no fundamental value, and a few recently released tokens, like the Hawk Tuah memecoin, have been dogged by controversy. Some leaders in the crypto space have been warning that once the joke stops being funny, most memecoins will crash to their ultimate end state: zero.—NF