Who is Natalie Collins? Former UnitedHealthcare employee alleges being trained to deny medical claims

Natalie Collins is a former UnitedHealthcare employee who has lately been making a lot of buzz about the alleged practices of UnitedHealthcare concerning medical claims. Collins is well known not only for her brief stint at UnitedHealthcare but also as the owner of Mother's Keeper Doula, a service that supports mothers through pregnancy and child delivery.

Collins brings rich experience from working in the healthcare industry, currently as a doula. All these present her with valuable insights into why patients get hassled with how health insurance programs work.

According to her Mother's Keeper Douls profile:

“I am a married mother of two boys who are over 10 years apart in age! I have worked in the medical field for over 10 years in various positions before I became a full-time doula.”

Recently, Collins appeared on NewsNation Prime, where she elaborated on her experiences and the broader implications of health insurance practices. Collins, who worked for UnitedHealthcare for nine months, claims that she was trained specifically to deny medical claims rather than to assist clients in obtaining necessary healthcare services.

"We weren't given proper instruction to actually pay the claim, and there weren't enough monies in certain files in certain companies to pay the claims."

"We would have to just get the client off the phone as fast as we could.”

“They just wouldn’t allow me to submit the claim. There would be alerts on each claim telling us that either we had to put it back in our queue and it would just go to someone else, 30 days later, 60 days later.”

Insurance companies and healthcare tragedies

A new study by NORC at the University of Chicago finds that an astonishing percentage of U.S. adults blame health insurance companies for the role they play in health-related tragedies, at least after a recent UnitedHealthcare murder case where Brian Thompson, its chief executive officer, was killed. More than 70% of the respondents blamed these health insurance companies.

The survey indicated that although a majority of respondents attributed a "great deal" or "moderate amount" of responsibility for Thompson's death to the individual who committed the act, many also pointed fingers at insurance companies.

The study pointed out intergenerational variations in the belief of who blamed whom. Specifically, younger adults, especially those below 30, were more apt to see things as a complex interplay of factors– the killer, the insurance practices.

The public outcry since the murder of Thompson has been interspersed with long-standing issues against health insurers. Many people in America regard insurers as personifications of health care's underlying problems, from high costs to lack of adequate access to prescribed treatments.

Three words - "delay," "deny," and "depose" - appeared on ammunition next to the corpse. These very words have characterized common criticisms targeting insurers for being reluctant to honor claims.

Brian Thompson's murder

UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson was shot dead on December 4, 2024, in front of New York Hilton Midtown in Manhattan. He was attending UnitedHealth Group's annual investors' meeting, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare.

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Luigi Nicholas Mangione was identified as a suspect who had fired three rounds from a suppressed 9mm pistol that had hit Thompson from the back and on the leg.

Five days later, Mangione was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania. When arrested, he was found with a firearm related to the murder and had writings expressing his resentment towards corporate entities. Mangione currently faces several charges among them murder as an act of terrorism.

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