A former employee of UnitedHealthcare has revealed that the company used to give systematic training to employees to deny medical claims. The former employee Natalie Collins told NewsNation that there used to be two to three months of training initially for the new employees, with supervisors standing behind and monitoring how fast an employee got the call of the customer off. She claimed there was not a single instruction about how to pay the claim. 

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She said in her statement, "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." 

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

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Collins said that when desperate customers used to cry over the call for money, the supervisors used to laugh. She quit her job after she attempted to approve the payment for a widow and a mother of five, whose husband died due to cancer. She said her supervisor told her to deny the claim and get her off the call. 

"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 go to someone else, 30 days later, 60 days later," she said. 

Collins said she condemns the violence, but she understands public anger. She said, "I don't believe anyone should die, but people are angry. People have reasons to be very angry, and I feel that to my bones. I've seen it, I lived it, I processed them, and I denied them." 

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Murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO 

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UnitedHealthcare came into headlines after its CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead in New York earlier in December. Luigi Manginoe, an Ivy League graduate, was arrested as a suspect in the murder but he pleaded not guilty. Investigation revealed that he was not a client of UnitedHealthcare but he took up the murder as vigilante work. 

(With inputs from agencies)