Despite being the subject of a full month of scrutiny in the wake of its CEO's murder, UnitedHealthcare is, somehow, still going to extreme lengths to deny health insurance claims — and one surgeon has taken to social media to speak out about it.

In a post on TikTok, Texas surgeon Elisabeth Potter was flabbergasted by a recent exchange she'd had with a UHC representative who called her when she was in the middle of a procedure to ask if the patient's overnight stay was necessary.

"It's 2025," the Austin-based plastic surgeon declared, "and insurance just keeps getting worse."

UnitedHealthcare has become the epicenter of a fierce debate surrounding the systematic denial of health insurance claims in the US. Case in point, the company went as far as to deploy an error-prone AI algorithm in 2023 to override claims to elderly patients that had been approved by their doctors.

During a breast reconstruction procedure, Potter said she was contacted in the operating room and told that a UHC rep had called and needed to speak to her right away about the patient she was operating on. She scrubbed out and gave the "gentleman," a call — only to be questioned about the woman's diagnosis and "whether her inpatient stay should be justified."

"I was like, 'do you understand that she's asleep right now and she has breast cancer?'" Potter recounted. "And the gentleman said, 'actually, I don't — that's a different department that would know that information.'"

Clearly perturbed, Potter told the representative that the overnight post-surgery stay was indeed necessary — and that moreover, UHC should already have that information because the surgery had already been approved.

"'I need to go back,'" she recalled telling the man, "'and be with my patient now.'"

The incident highlights a fundamentally deficient and notoriously greedy health insurance system in the United States. UnitedHealthcare, the country's largest health insurer, has played a major role, garnering a reputation for doing everything in its power to save money by denying coverage.

As Potter explained, she'd never had anything quite like that happen during her career as a surgeon. For all the stories we've heard about cruel claim denials in the month since Brian Thompson's murder, the incident stands out.

"It's out of control," the surgeon concluded. "Insurance is out of control. I have no other words."