Oh no, another impending "someone's life is more important than your interest rate" argument.

@A.W.E.S.O.M.-O: depends on the rate :)

Tough call....
I hate both companies but I have to give UHC the edge due to their latest article about un-approving a claim

this is a good match-up, should be interesting to see how this one plays out

Really tough call. I have to go with impact here. Money versus health. Since I'd rather be healthy but broke than sick and loaded, I'd have to say United Healthcare is the greater sinner.

@Steaming Pile: If your loaded, why not just pay your own hospital bills?

Oh, and I voted for United "Healthcare".

I've got a card with Chase. The customer service is friendly. They raise my credit limit pretty much whenever I ask, to whatever I'd like. They're also one of the only CC companies I've dealt with that allows direct download into Quicken. (Not important, I know) Maybe they're only friendly to people who aren't indebted to them... Hooray for Chase!

Side note: "Insert Blank" healthcare company for the win.

DEFINITELY Untited Healthcare. They are pure evil.

United Health Care failed to notify me that I was no longer eligible for insurance under my father's plan. The assholes told him they were sending out a notification "packet" to me. I'm pretty sure I would have noticed that. Now I have to scramble for the lesser evil of BC/BS from my employer, if I'm eligible for that at all. Their last open enrollment period was in January. My UHC insurance expired in... December. Screw you, UHC!

On the other hand, Chase has sent me a bogus, shady offer from their "non-affiliated" affiliates about once a month. How can a company be not affiliated with Chase when the offers come in a CHASE ENVELOPE?! Very sneaky and underhanded. However, their cashback rewards trump both Capital One and Discover... Damn.

United Health Care is probably the worst of the worst out of the big health insurers (who constitute possibly the worst industry in America). They should easily be in the final four. Their CEO received $1.1 BILLION in stock options as compensation (yes, "billion" with a 'b'). Read about it here. This, while they were claiming they needed to retroactively cancel people's coverage and routinely screw providers on payment. It's clear where the "savings" from those shady practices were going.

Chase, while not perfect, is not that bad of a credit card company. They have really good rewards cards and have paid me 5% cash back on my groceries, gas, and drug store purchases for several years now. I've never had serious problems with them.

Awesome maechup.
But what if it end in a United healthcare VS Blue cross/Blue shield?
Would it be an automatic default or the top position be shared by the evil of evil healthcare?

Man, Chase is evil incarnate. Its pervasive systematic evil that reaches every customer. UHC has done nothing to me.

Chase took over my old bank, and the experience has been hell. Their new trick is to change the date of my deposits inthe system so they can still claim they are clearing my checks within the guidlines.

The other one is to charge me a check printing fee normally charged when the customer requests a copy of a cancelled check, though I have not done so. What I tracked it down to, is when they receive an electronic payment - I pay my auto insurance, etc., they print out a copy so they can then rescan it into the system, and then charge me a $3 fee.

im gonna say united health care; cause at least when chase screws you, you wont die cause your life saving surgery was denied.

Wow. Do we really have to choose between these two evil empires? They are both strong candidates for the Final Four. I just can't choose to let one of them off in the first round.

I like Chase. I have two credit cards with them. Never had any problems. Good rewards program with Chase Freedom.

@A.W.E.S.O.M.-O: Well, it's true.

I had to vote for UHG. They are the sort of company that gives capitalism a bad name, and Bill McGuire is the poster boy for it all.

He's actually not worth $1.1billion anymore. He had to give back several hundred million dollars to clear up that little stock option backdating problem he ran into.

UHG's new CEO, Stephen Helmsley, really isn't much different. Just that he's sitting on $600million+ instead of $800million.

The latest UHG scandal involves their Ingenix subsidiary. They compile health care cost information used to determine 'reasonable and customary' charges. It's alleged that Ingenix has manipulated data in order to lower payments to doctors and hospitals which, of course, greatly helps the part of UHG that is paying claims.

As for Chase, I can't complain. The CC I have with them is the best deal I've ever gotten: When I opened the card I got a 0% fixed APR for balance transfers for 1 year, with no fee. The standard APR for purchases is 8.99%, and the card has a decent rewards program.

@Buran: Not necessarily. I think a utilitarian would say that screwing millions of people over years and years creates a greater collective disutility than letting a couple of people die once in a while who didn't read their policy terms carefully enough.

With that said, insurance companies get hammered in these contests because any sort of customer service breakdown is construed as "Oh my god, they're trying to kill me." Not defending UHC here, they might be truly reprehensible, but the cited comments on them are almost purely emotional...I don't think it's the company's fault if your insurance lapses or you don't read/understand the terms of your policy.

I am surprised it's so lopsided towards UHC, I expected it to be neck and neck

Jumping on the "Chase never gave me any static" bandwagon. I do all my banking with them, too.

While I have 2 credit cards with them, I always pay on time, and recently I decided I would no longer carry a balance and paid it off. My interest rates are 9.49 and 7.49. No rewards, though. I may have to bother them to add rewards to one of them.

They did do something somewhat shady - when I opened my checking account, they signed me up for one of those credit cards without my knowledge. Of course, this was in the days of 0% interest for 12 months, so I didn't mind too much. Ah, 2006.

Now, UHC? I never heard of them before reading Consumerist. Of course, they're health insurance, so they're automatically the more evil company. It's like relativity: health insurance companies are absolutely evil in all reference frames.

I have to vote for Chase, they're shady as hell. My ex ran up $400 in overdraft fees last year. After killing him, I deposited over $300. Balance should been around -$100, right? Nope, still -$400. Then they closed the account & couldn't tell me where my $300 went. So they basically STOLE my money & told me that there's no recourse. So yeah, fuck them.

@A.W.E.S.O.M.-O: Uh, no. It's not just for "emotional" reasons that people think UHC is bad. Read the comments above. They have been systematically screwing healthcare providers out of reimbursement, while also pulling shady practices on policy-holders. We aren't talking about just stingy stuff, but things that are essentially outright fraud in my opinion. I'm not talking about UHC specifically here, but a lot of problems that are common in the health insurance industry. UHC is just a particularly egregious offender and one whose executives are making a killing, quite literally.

And obviously you aren't familiar with the background on retroactive policy cancellations (something that isn't limited to UHC)...this isn't due to the customer letting their coverage "lapse" or not understanding the terms of the policy. It's things like someone getting cancer and your insurer unilaterally deciding they are going to retroactively cancel ALL your coverage because you failed to disclose that you occasionally suffered from seasonal allergies. It specifically targets people that have expensive covered conditions. That isn't an attempt to prevent fraud by patients...that's an attempt to weasel out of responsibility for paying.

There is a laundry list of nasty practices by health insurers that I could go into. These things are just getting more prevalent because of the rising cost of healthcare. It's becoming pretty much a high-stakes gamble whether or not your insurer will actually pay any given medical bill. They are bordering on massive organized criminal organizations.

A tough one, but denying people life-saving treatment > denying people financial stability.

Why are these 2 company meeting now. They both should be in the finals.

@johnva: I think comments like "in the business of letting people die," "screw the customer as their guiding principle," and "absolute bottom of the pile" are firmly in the emotional camp without additional details. All I can find on here is that UHC charged someone $90 and made someone else pay $50 more for pills. Chase tries to screw me out of a lot more than $50 every month, not to mention that UHC plans appear in the top 100 of USNews' Best Health Plans list.

I am indeed familiar with retroactive policy cancellation (I don't know it's "obvious" that I'm not), but please cite a source for an insurer cancelling someone's cancer coverage because they failed to disclose seasonal allergies. If you didn't disclose that you smoked and then tried to file a claim for lung cancer treatment, I would cancel your policy too.

Finally, one of the complaints in the comments was a policy lapsing and the person not being reminded, which is why I mentioned it. Obviously, you aren't familiar with that.

I HATE United Health Care. I took my three children in to have their teeth cleaned. Untied DENIED the clam becasue it had been less than six month since the last cleaning. Turns out it had been five months and 29 days since their last cleaning. Had I waited one more day United would have paid the claim. When I complained I was told by several reps that I was SOL. JERKS!!!

*All* the chicken parm rotellos? Well dang them to h-e-double hockey sticks!

I went thru a BK 8 years ago and to regain my credit I got a Chase CC. And then I got two more, they were all at or above 19% when I opened them. I never had more than 3 or 4k on them combined but kept them and the balances just to get my credit scores back up. So 2 years ago, when my scores finally topped 700, I applied for and received a card from another bank at 6.99%, I paid off and cancelled the Chase CC's in the space of 20 minutes (even the one with no annual fee). These relentless bastards have sent me over 10 offers a week, every week, since cancellation all at or above 12%. WTF is that?

Having said that and having read the horrors stories here about United HealthCare, how could you vote for anyone other that an insurance company in this poll?

UHC has been fine to my wife and me. My wife has MS and has had numerous MRIs, chemotherapy, and takes an injectable medication which costs ~$1500 per month. Never has there been a problem with coverage. When her neurologist ordered an MRI of the spine in addition to the standard MRI of the brain -- which occurred on a different day -- Ingenix called a couple of weeks later simply to find out if this was a work injury. When told she was disabled and had MS, they simply thanked her and apologized for bothering her. Perfectly reasonable.

As much as I dislike Chase (and have personal experiences with them), the Consumerist taught me that Chase is chump change compared to United Healthcare.

@A.W.E.S.O.M.-O: Read this.

(The above link is about a case involving WellPoint, where they cancelled a woman's coverage after she got breast cancer because of undisclosed minor preexisting conditions that were totally unrelated to the cancer). I agree that insurers should have some remedy if the pre-existing condition that was not disclosed is directly relevant to a condition for which a claim is being made. But what they are doing is basically auditing accounts of people who get diseases that will cost a lot of money, and trying to find ANY pretext to cancel their policy (by comparing their medical records to what the patient put on the disclosure form). The link above says that during a lawsuit employees testified that it was policy to do this to people who made expensive claims, and that it didn't matter whether it was a willful non-disclosure or not.

If the insurers are so concerned about catching fraud, why don't they just perform the records audit themselves before issuing insurance and collecting any premiums? It seems to me that they want to just collect premiums from people who pay on the grounds that they will be covered, and then not pay out when something actually does happen. I'm glad insurers are getting sued (and laws are being changed) over this practice.

@johnva: Yeah, that's pretty reprehensible, I agree.

But that's Wellpoint. Perhaps they should be in this matchup instead?

I don't work for UHC or anything, I just hate Chase that much and I can't stand to watch them lose.

@A.W.E.S.O.M.-O: Wellpoint is not alone in these practices. UHC specifically is notorious mainly for their obscene executive compensation and for their practices involving their dealings with healthcare providers (though I wouldn't be surprised at all if they are playing the retroactive cancellation games too).

I'll admit my bias: I don't really blame the insurers for this so much as I blame the government policies and society that make our healthcare dependent on private insurers. This sort of brutal cost-cutting is to be expected if you provide healthcare mainly through for-profit private insurance companies, especially given how expensive healthcare has gotten. I think the solution is to nationalize the health insurance industry and fund it as a necessary cost of maintaining civil society (kind of like the military), instead of viewing it as a profitable industry. These insurers are just doing what the free market demands of them, which is to find "creative" ways to make bigger profits in a tough environment.

@johnva: But with a nationalized system, we know empirically from other countries that quality of care drops and wait times lengthen drastically. Pick your poison...

@A.W.E.S.O.M.-O: Actually, that's not correct that you can make a blanket statement that quality of care drops and wait times lengthen drastically. It's simply another type of rationing of healthcare (our current system here is essentially rationing based on ability to pay). Quality of care and wait time in places with nationalized systems is dramatically better than the quality of care that people with no insurance get in the U.S. So while yes, all countries have to "ration" healthcare, many do it more equally than we do here. Priority for care should be given based on medical need, not ability to pay.

Moreover, it's not like we don't have long wait times and sometimes poor quality of care here, too. I have had to wait many months just for an initial appointment with a specialist in medical fields where they are in short supply (actually, primary care is one of those areas with a doctor shortage in the U.S., partly because primary care docs make FAR less money than specialists do here due largely to the way that insurance and Medicare/Medicaid reimburses them). Our healthcare system is FAR from the best in the world, especially if you account for the price that we all pay for the services we get.

Healthcare in the charge of Capitalism? How could it go wrong?

Can we have a Worst Company runner-up for Chase to compete in? ;)

@johnva: I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with the assumptions that you make. As "unequal" as you think it is to ration healthcare based on ability to pay, is it any fairer that medical need is the dispositive factor? What incentive is there to live healthy when all that's going to happen is that you have to disproportionally subsidize AND wait your turn after people who smoke and eat Big Macs every day and cause themselves medical emergencies down the line?

Wow, this is a really good and interesting matchup. To me UHC automatically wins because of how they make people miserable by doing things like killing them.

@A.W.E.S.O.M.-O: To clarify, I absolutely agree that when it comes to ER visits, medical needs should be prioritized, but that's already the case in the U.S., so I'm assuming you mean doctor's appointments.

@A.W.E.S.O.M.-O:

The best incentive to live healthy is BEING HEALTHY. It's not a good quality of life to be sick all the time. It's not all about monetary incentives; that's a weirdly American idea that people won't do things unless you pay them to do it or penalize them for not doing it. Lots of health issues have little or nothing to do with lifestyle issues that are under our control, and yet our current system penalizes those people just as heavily as it penalizes people who are the cause of their own health problems. So yes, I believe it is more fair to prioritize care based on something other than ability to pay. And it's more efficient, too, since people who can't pay won't wait until their health problems reach a critical point before seeking treatment (thus ending up costing everyone more money in the end).

As for prioritizing only ER visits based on health needs, that's already proven to be a failed system. It has led to the poor relying heavily on ER facilities for primary care, since those are one of the few places that can't turn them away if they can't pay. That in turn has led to massive wait times and reduced quality of care for genuine emergencies. So what you're saying is not a good solution. We want to encourage those people to seek care from a primary care doc where things can be caught early and where it doesn't cost so much to treat them.

United Healthcare denied my mother breast reduction surgery for the last 5 years because they said it was cosmetic. Did I mention she's 5 fee