The corruption allegations against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are only getting worse after a review discovered last week that the RV-loving, yacht-riding, jet-setting judge did not recuse himself from a 2004 health insurance case despite a clear conflict of interest.
In 1999, Thomas took a $267,230 loan from health insurance executive Anthony Welters to buy a motor coach, a term he will defend more vehemently than the well-being of the nation’s populace. Welters was CEO of AmeriChoice when he gave Thomas the loan. The executive claims it was just money given to a friend… who happened to serve on the Supreme Court when they met. The HMO would be acquired by UnitedHealth in 2002, where he remained an executive. While Justice Thomas recused himself from two cases involving UnitedHealth, Rolling Stone found that not only he participated in a case but he also wrote the court’s unanimous decision.
Aetna Health Inc. v. Davila, the 2004 case in question, confirmed that insurers couldn’t be held liable for malpractice when the health plan denies life-saving or medically necessary treatment. While UnitedHealth wasn’t a named party in the case, the decision had massive ramifications for the entire healthcare industry. Coincidentally, Welters extended Thomas’ loan by a decade in 2004, and it was eventually forgiven in 2008. Rolling Stone spoke with one of the lawyers from the case:
George Parker Young was the lawyer for the patients in Aetna Health. After the decision, he says, he stopped handling cases suing health insurers on behalf of patients and doctors. “I just got out of it,” he says. “It had been 100 percent of my cases, and I wound up that docket.”
Young notes the Supreme Court’s decision was unanimous, and his clients may well have lost 8-0 if Thomas had recused himself in the case — instead of authoring the opinion.
“What I won’t do … is say, ‘Oh my gosh, if Justice Thomas had recused, I would have won that case.’ I can’t say that, and that would be disingenuous for me to say that,” he says. But looking back now at the RV loan provided by Welters, Young says, “It does stink.”
He says if he knew about the loan during the case, “I would have moved to recuse,” adding that “there’s no question this case was going to impact all national HMOs that did any kind of employer-based health care.”
The outcome might not have shifted but the gravity of cases deliberated before the Supreme Court requires the most stringent impartiality possible. In the 2004 decision, Thomas wrote that denied patients should just pay out of pocket for their life-saving care. To hold that opinion, Justice Thomas either views $267,000 as an inconsequential amount of money or he was swayed by the lavish gifts sent by corporate interests. Either way, the judge is far more out of touch with the average American despite his love for cross-country road trips.