Source: Bigstock

The only interesting question for me about insurance, health, or otherwise is whether the insurance companies or their clients are the more dishonest. No doubt there is a dialectical relationship between them; I have always rather casually supposed that insurance companies don’t really mind fraudulent claims because they can pass on the costs (plus a percentage) to their clients. Thus fraud, no doubt within limits, is profitable for everyone except the unfortunate honest payers of premiums such as I, and no doubt you, dear reader.

I mention this only as a preamble to the fact that I happened upon an article recently that extensively quoted the chief executive officer of UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, whose chief executive, Brian Thompson, was shot and killed in Manhattan not long ago (since the case is sub judice, I won’t mention the supposed killer by name).

The subheading of the title of the article was “The CEO is concerned about recent customer behavior,” on reading which I could not suppress a slight wintry smile. Perhaps it was a consequence of my initial ignorance, but by the time I finished the article I was not much the wiser about the patient behavior that gave rise to the CEO’s “concern,” for the article was written, and he spoke in, what was for me an impenetrable jargon.

“Ghostly abstract mental entities float in an ether independently of any actual human minds.”

A photograph of the CEO of UnitedHealth was captioned “UnitedHealth CEO finally addresses outrage,” without stating which or whose outrage he had “addressed” (“addressed” being a weaselly word that could mean anything from abject apology to ferocious counterattack).

The outrage was, of course, that caused by allegations that the company denied, and continues to deny, legitimate claims by its clients, even when they were, and are, dying. According to the article, shareholders were like the CEO: They expressed “concern,” though only about “the macroeconomic risks associated with the company’s practices.” I think that for “macroeconomic risks” we may read “share price.”

The article goes on to tell us that “Amid this controversy, UnitedHealth revealed in its first-quarter earnings report of 2025 that it faced a $9.8 billion year-over-year increase in revenues so far this year…. However, the UnitedHealth CEO warned…that the company did not meet expectations.”

Faced an $9.8 billion increase in revenue? Did this mean that the CEO anticipated that revenues would increase by only $9.8 billion?

And who was warned of what? Whose expectations—or hopes—had been dashed? We seem to be living in a world of which Mrs. Gradgrind was prophetic:

“Are you in pain, dear mother?”

“I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room,” said Mrs Gradgrind, “but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.”

Pains without anyone being in pain; warnings without anyone being warned; expectations without anyone who expects. Ghostly abstract mental entities float in an ether independently of any actual human minds. None of this seems to me calculated “to finally address outrage.” I cannot imagine anyone denied, or allegedly denied, health care being much assuaged by learning that the company’s revenues this year would increase by only $9.8 billion.

Reading a pronouncement by the CEO made one long for a speech by the late Leonid Brezhnev, which would have been full of romance and fantasy by comparison:

We added more new Medicare patients to OptumHealth, a portion of whom were covered by plans that were exiting markets. They experienced a surprising lack of engagement last year, which led to 2025 reimbursement levels well below what we would expect and likely not reflective of their actual health status. Additionally, many of the current and new complex patients we serve are more affected by the CMS risk model changes that we are in the process of implementing…. You’ve seen premiums and benefits start to be affected in the marketplace…. That is now driving a different behavior from group members, and that’s what we’ve picked up in this area.

I am sure that the CEO is well compensated, as the cant word puts it, and perhaps in this case the use of this word is justified. Not for all the money in the world would I be willing and obliged to have thoughts such as his, expressed in such language.

I try to imagine what it must be like to have thoughts running in one’s head such as those expressed in the above quotation, but I just can’t imagine it. I would prefer to read a telephone directory (the yellow pages, read aright, could actually be, in the day when they still existed, a stimulus to the imagination). And I am far from sure that I could even manage to think or speak in that way, for whenever I have tried for satirical purposes to imitate the speech of managers, I have never been able entirely to expunge clear meaning from what I say; the concrete keeps breaking through the abstraction.

Managerial language is in the modern corporatist world what langue de bois (wooden language) was to the communist world. Those who best mastered langue de bois became the nomenklatura; those who master managerial language become the equivalent in huge and cartelized commercial bureaucracies.

In her analysis of communist (particularly Soviet) langue de bois, Françoise Thom, the French Sovietologist and historian of Russia, quotes examples:

After the elaboration of the programme of supplies and of the implementation of the plans, it is vital to give the greatest importance to the amelioration of the economic mechanism.

She says:

No other regime knows better [than the communist] how to take control of language and use it for its own ends. But the language it uses is not everyday language. One can make out the usual words and expressions, but there is something quite foreign about it all…. The lack of real content strikes one immediately…. The flood of words seems to spring from nowhere…. It seems able to keep pouring for ever and ever.

The same can be said of corporatist language. Of course, one must not exaggerate. Even if such language much resembles communist langue de bois, we do not yet live in a society with a single, all-powerful manager. Moreover, what seems to be jargon is sometimes necessary; one can’t convey genetic science, for example, in everyday language. But there is jargon that is necessary for technical reasons, and there is jargon that is used as a smokescreen for relations of power and to make the disreputable reputable. Its use becomes habitual, so that one is suspicious wherever and whenever it is used, even when the person using it has nothing to hide. It is destructive of trust and promotional of paranoia. For by their language shall ye know them.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).