John Oliver returned to “Last Week Tonight” this week after a month off the air. He used most of the episode to take aim at UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, according to The Guardian. The timing comes as Luigi Mangione prepares for sentencing after pleading guilty in August to killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024. Oliver pointed to a poll taken after the shooting. It found that 69% of respondents blamed insurance companies’ coverage denials at least in part for the killing. According to Oliver, UnitedHealth Group brought in $447 billion in 2025. That puts it behind only Walmart and Amazon among U.S. companies by revenue. The company has about 2,700 subsidiaries, spanning clinics, pharmacies and even its own bank. Oliver focused on UnitedHealthcare’s insurance claims Much of the segment focused on how United handles claims. Oliver brought up a disabled girl named Emmy. Her mother said an insurance rep once told her to “wipe down” her daughter instead of covering a bathing chair. It took hours of calls before United approved it. John Oliver on UnitedHealth Group: ‘Algorithmically driven, ruthless arbiters of who lives and who dies’ | John Oliver | The Guardian https://t.co/w4pXzpq7lj— WanderinWoodsmanin support of (@WanderNWoodsman) September 21, 2026 When Emmy outgrew the chair, her parents skipped United entirely. Coworkers of her father helped pay for a new one instead. Other customers have raised similar complaints, including a South Carolina mother who said she felt helpless after her son’s rehab coverage was denied. Oliver argued that this pattern makes insurance look a lot like not having it at all. The most serious case involved Cole Schmidtknecht, a 22-year-old from Wisconsin with severe asthma. He went to pick up his usual Advair inhaler, which normally cost $66. OptumRx, UnitedHealth Group’s pharmacy benefit manager, had dropped the drug from coverage. The price had jumped to more than $539. Schmidtknecht left without it. He later suffered a severe asthma attack and died. “That is an absolute tragedy and it was completely preventable,” Oliver said. The case adds to a growing list of pharmacy coverage complaints from United customers, including a woman who said a denied prescription was followed by an unexpected bathroom scale in the mail. Online, frustration with United has turned into its own kind of genre, especially on TikTok. Oliver joked that telling the company to go “f**k itself” now counts as an entire video category. Oliver repeated his long-standing call for single-payer healthcare, though he admitted that goal still looks far off. As a smaller step, he pointed to a bipartisan bill from Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley. It would separate health insurers from the providers they also own. “While that is clearly not going nearly far enough, it is at least a start,” Oliver said. He closed by arguing that companies like United are, at best, “pointless time-wasting middlemen” and, at worst, “ruthless arbiters of who lives and who dies.”