Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
UnitedHealth Will See You in Court
It’s been a rough couple of years for the Minnetonka-based health industry giant UnitedHealth Group. Congress grilled the insurer following a major cyberattack last year. It’s been accused of marking up generic drugs by thousands of a percent. Reports have shown that it surveils health-care workers, uses predictive tech to deny claims, and limits care to autistic kids. It disappointed Wall Street last quarter with a mere $101.81 billion in revenue. Oh, also, the head of its insurance division was murdered.
But UnitedHealth has found a surefire way to fix its public image: Suing people who say bad things about it on the internet. Bloomberg Law reports that UHG has hired the law firm Clare Locke, defamation specialists best known for securing Dominion Voting Systems’ $787.5 million settlement with Fox News, to take on its critics.
UnitedHealth’s foe isn’t quite on the level of Fox: Its lawyers are going after a plastic surgeon in Austin, Texas, who made some heated complaints about her dealings with the company. Per UHG, she is “using her social media following to perpetuate inaccuracies, which is irresponsible, unethical and dangerous.” But the doctor, Elisabeth Potter, is defending against the claim saying her post was accurate.
Can’t wait for voir dire on this one, if only for the prospective jurors’ answers to the question, “Do you have any opinions about health care insurers?”
Funding Freeze Fallout in St. Paul
Kinda hard to concentrate on what’s happening around town while a ketamine-addled goon guts the republic, department by department. So let’s local angle that shit and take a look at what effects the Trump administration’s unconstitutional holds on federal spending have had on actual people in St. Paul, courtesy of Fred Melo at the Pioneer Press.
Melo speaks to Center for Victims of Torture, Neighborhood House, and other nonprofits with a local footprint, some of whom are hopeful that courts will reverse the freeze but are suffering from depleted funds regardless. “We have to prepare for the worst and hope for the best,” says Kelly Martinson of the Kids Count on Us childcare centers.
Personally, I wouldn’t have granted Bill Glahn from the Center of the American Experiment an opportunity to pontificate about fraud and tell us that Elon Musk is separating “the wheat from the chaff”—at least not without asking Glahn whether he thinks the executive branch has the power to unilaterally cancel congressional expenditures or not.
But Scott Roehm of the CVT knows what’s happening here: “This is all about the Trump administration puffing its chest as much as it can to see how much power it can grab from the other two branches of government… consequences be damned.”
Warrant: Defense Lawyer Slipped Drug-Soaked Paperwork to Clients
Here’s a wild and kinda sad one for you. A search warrant filed Monday alleges that attorney Sarah Gad slipped papers soaked in cocaine and fentanyl to two of her clients in Hennepin County Jail.
The Star Tribune’s Paul Walsh reports that, according to the warrant, the Sheriff’s Office searched a trash bin outside Gad’s home and found liquor bottles with illegal drugs on them and seized “stacks of paperwork with a powdery residue on them, cocaine in a baggie, and methamphetamine” from within her home. The attorney denies the charges. (“I recycle, first of all,” she tells the Strib.)
Gad, you may recall, got a lot of coverage when she announced that she would run against Rep. Ilhan Omar in the DFL primary for the Fifth Congressional District last year, with the Washington Post spotlighting her inspirational story of overcoming addiction and poverty.
Love Bugs for Sale by Zoo
“Give someone bug-tterflies this Valentine’s Day! This year, give a gift they’re sure to remember when you name a bug after someone you love … or someone who just bugs you.” So reads the copy for the Minnesota Zoo’s ingenious new fundraising campaign, which, for a $15 donation, allows you naming rights to a cricket, mealworm, or other critter to be fed to one of the zoo’s hungry inhabitants.
The zoo’s Sarah Lennander tells MPR News that the campaign has been a hit, with kids and exes among the most common recipients of the gift. And donors are suggesting their own ideas for future campaigns. “A husband called asking if he could name a piece of meat that would be fed to a komodo dragon, his wife’s favorite animal,” Lennander says. Our suggestion: Why not let people eat the bugs themselves?
At least one Friend of Racket has contributed to the zoo’s campaign, naming her bug “Jacob Frey.” As serious journalists, we would never condone such behavior. We are merely reporting a fact.
