The apparent murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday has unleashed an extraordinary outpouring of emotion. But it’s not all horror or sadness over a 50-year-old father of two being shot dead in public by a man in a mask.
Thompson’s death has sparked an outpouring of anger over the way his insurance company and others treat (or abuse) people in their moments of greatest need. Some reactions, especially on social media, were downright cheerful about the murder.
What a stunning illustration of the hatred so many Americans feel toward for-profit health insurers, which too often make money for shareholders by denying care to sick people.
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UnitedHealthcare is a particularly horrible example. It is notorious for high denial rates and low reimbursement levels.
According to an investigation by the medical news site Stat and a federal lawsuit recently filed in Minnesota, UnitedHealthcare used a deeply flawed artificial intelligence algorithm to wrongly deny health care to elderly and disabled patients. Stat reported that the company “pressured its medical staff to stop payments for seriously ill patients… and deny rehabilitation care to elderly and disabled Americans as profits soared.”
ProPublica reported last month that the company used algorithms to identify people it deemed guilty of “therapy overuse” and deny mental health care. Both California and Massachusetts found that the company violated federal law that requires insurers to cover mental health conditions the same way they cover physical ailments. UnitedHealthcare denied claims for more than 34,000 therapy sessions between 2013 and 2020 in New York alone, saving the company about $8 million.
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Adding to this unsavory picture, four of its top executives, including Thompson, have come under scrutiny for $101.5 million in stock transactions they executed after the company was notified it was the target of a federal antitrust investigation, but before the news became public and the stock price fell.
Perhaps all this helps explain why as of Friday morning, more than 85,000 people had responded with a laughing emoji to UnitedHealthcare’s solemn Facebook statement on Thompson’s death.
People on other social media platforms piled in as well.
“All human life is sacred, so it is not appropriate to laugh when serious harm happens to someone,” one Bluesky user wrote. “The moral thing to do is charge them hundreds of thousands of dollars instead.”
“The CEO of UnitedHealth faces the same fate as many of his customers,” another Bluesky user posted above photos of the gunman pointing his gun at Thompson’s back before allegedly riding away on an e-bike.
Stories also emerged of terrible interactions with the nation’s largest health insurer.
Elizabeth Austin, a single mother living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, told me she had a miserable experience with UnitedHealthcare after her young daughter, Carolyn, was diagnosed with leukemia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her chemotherapy caused nausea, so Carolyn’s doctor ordered a nighttime feeding tube to supplement what little she could eat while awake. She said United Healthcare would not pay for the feeding tube unless Carolyn stopped eating solid food altogether.
“I thought, ‘She’s 9! She wants to eat! ”Austin told me. Unmoved, the insurer forced Austin to pay $900 a month out of pocket for the device.
Later, when Carolyn developed a sensitivity to a sedative used during her monthly lumbar punctures, her doctors switched to a different drug, and the company again denied payment, Austin said. She also paid for that herself.
Austin said she eventually developed a stress-related heart condition that required ablation surgery. She and her daughter are now healthy, but the scars remain. She said she was saddened but not shocked when she heard about Thompson’s death.
“These things happen because people are really struggling,” she told me. “I don’t think the CEO was responsible for my daughter’s health care issues, but it’s smart to ask, ‘Why did this happen?’ Could it be a systemic problem?’ People succumb to the pressure.”
At this time, the motive for Thompson’s murder is a matter of speculation. But ammunition recovered at the scene was engraved with words often used to describe insurance companies’ anti-patient strategies, including “deny” and “defend,” the Associated Press and others reported.
In the 2010 book “Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It,” Rutgers law professor Jay M. Feinman traces the evolution of insurance companies from generally helpful organizations where adjusters – that is, humans – were responsible for paying back the antagonistic, algorithm-driven behemoths they are today.
In the 1990s, he writes, insurance companies like Allstate turned to the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. to develop new strategies.
“McKinsey,” Feinman writes, “saw claims as a zero-sum game, with the policyholder and the company competing for the same dollars. No longer would every claim be considered on its merits.” Computers would determine fees, and settlements would be offered on a take-it-or-litigate basis. Feinman writes that McKinsey urged Allstate to “move from ‘Good Hands’ to ‘Boxing Gloves’.”
Earlier this year, insurance giant Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield announced it would cap anesthesia reimbursements based on its own time frames for surgeries. The idea, Anthem said, was to prevent overbilling. Doctors were predictably furious.
“This is just the latest in a long line of abhorrent behavior by commercial health insurers seeking to boost their profits at the expense of patients and physicians who provide essential care,” Donald Arnold, president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, told NPR.
On Thursday, following the outburst against health insurers sparked by Thompson’s killing, Anthem reversed course and blamed “significant widespread misinformation” about the proposed policy for the reversal.
No wonder there is so little empathy for Brian Thompson, who was a nice person in many ways. Due to his death, he has unknowingly become a symbol of the terrible things that health insurers do to people for money.
Blue sky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Topics: @rabcarian
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
