Deny. Defend. Depose. — The System Gave It Meaning
🧷 “Deny. Defend. Depose.” — The System Gave It Meaning
On January 10, 2025, award-winning health care journalist Trudy Lieberman published a piece titled
“Deny. Defend. Depose: The Chilling Legacy of Managed Care and the American Health Care Crisis.”
In it, she traces the phrase not to violence—but to decades of documented corporate behavior in the American health insurance industry.
“Paying less for care meant more profits and return to investors, so it is no wonder that the alleged killer of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive reportedly left the chilling message: ‘DENY. DEFEND. DEPOSE,’ words associated with insurance company strategies for denying claims.”
Lieberman names what the public already knew:
“Deny. Defend. Depose.” is industry-standard conduct—not extremism.
It didn’t come from fringe rhetoric.
It came from the managed care model itself—born in the 1990s, refined through mergers, and enforced through denial algorithms and profit-based care limits.
For decades, patients have described the same pattern:
- First, deny the claim.
- Then, defend the denial.
- Finally, depose the patient—through paperwork, delay, appeals, or silence.
The phrase has lived in the public domain longer than UnitedHealthcare would like to admit.
This Isn’t About a Slogan. It’s About a Pattern.
Lieberman’s reporting confirms what whistleblowers, case managers, and patients have all described—what I named, and what UnitedHealthcare tried to criminalize.
“Deny. Defend. Depose.” is not a threat.
It’s a policy.
📖 Read the full article by Trudy Lieberman:
Click Here
📄 Preserved Copy:
A PDF archive of “Deny. Defend. Depose: The Chilling Legacy of Managed Care and the American Health Care Crisis” by Trudy Lieberman (January 10, 2025) is preserved and available HERE for public reference and evidentiary purposes.
Post by Samara
My name is Samara Dorn, and I’m a pro se civil rights litigant, trans survivor, and the creator of AdministrativeErasure.org.
This site exists because the systems that were supposed to protect people like me—HIPAA, Medicaid, and the health care safety net—were weaponized instead. In 2023, I was targeted by UnitedHealthcare through a cascade of administrative actions that included wrongful denial of hormone therapy, metadata surveillance, and unlawful disclosure of my personal health information to law enforcement—without my consent, without a warrant, and without legal justification.
I created this platform to document what happened, publish the evidence, and show how a single data point—someone’s gender, medication, or speech—can become a trigger for erasure inside corporate health systems.
I’m not a lawyer. I’m not backed by a law firm. I’m a disabled, low-income, trans woman fighting a multi-billion-dollar insurer using their own paper trail and their own tactics.
This is more than a legal fight. It’s a public reckoning with the machinery of denial, deflection, and depersonalization that governs American health care.
Everything on this site is based on public records, internal documents, whistleblower disclosures, and firsthand experience. No exaggeration. No filter. Just the receipts.
If you’ve ever felt erased by a system that was supposed to serve you, you’re not alone.