US healthcare company CEO killing
United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed on the street in midtown Manhattan early in the morning last Wednesday as he was heading toward an investor meeting. The response of the American public was brutal: tens of thousands of laughing emojis on the UHC Facebook announcement and numerous posts all over the internet in which people detailed the pain, suffering and death health insurance companies deal out on a regular basis. Top internet sleuths refused to help find the shooter.
A suspect is now in custody. Though he was mostly masked in surveillance photos, he doesn't appear to have been working extremely hard not to get caught, as he was recognized while eating at a McDonald's and had on his person several fake IDs, a gun and a silencer, and a handwritten manifesto against health insurance companies.
We don't yet know if Luigi Mangione had a personal reason or a more general motive for killing Brian Thompson; and of course we don't know for sure if the cops have the right guy either -- he is a long way from being a convicted killer, and the news sources are reproducing a lot of the cops' press releases. Mangione was valedictorian of his high school class at an expensive private school, and he has both bathelor's and master's degrees in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
Free link to NY Times updates: https://nytimes.com/live/2024/12/09/nyregion/unitedhealthcare-ceo-shooting-news?unlocked_article_code=1.gE4.M0jT.wNg6K6pTCO9p&smid=em-share.
There are several avenues of discussion, IMO: the enormous resources employed to find one killer (there wasn't a huge manhunt with a $10,000 reward for the killer in the recent racist stabbing); what the public's reaction says about us and about health insurance companies; whether this is going to make health insurance companies do anything besides beef up security for their executives; and whether or not this is part of any turning point in our new Gilded Age of astounding wealth inequality.
A suspect is now in custody. Though he was mostly masked in surveillance photos, he doesn't appear to have been working extremely hard not to get caught, as he was recognized while eating at a McDonald's and had on his person several fake IDs, a gun and a silencer, and a handwritten manifesto against health insurance companies.
We don't yet know if Luigi Mangione had a personal reason or a more general motive for killing Brian Thompson; and of course we don't know for sure if the cops have the right guy either -- he is a long way from being a convicted killer, and the news sources are reproducing a lot of the cops' press releases. Mangione was valedictorian of his high school class at an expensive private school, and he has both bathelor's and master's degrees in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
Free link to NY Times updates: https://nytimes.com/live/2024/12/09/nyregion/unitedhealthcare-ceo-shooting-news?unlocked_article_code=1.gE4.M0jT.wNg6K6pTCO9p&smid=em-share.
There are several avenues of discussion, IMO: the enormous resources employed to find one killer (there wasn't a huge manhunt with a $10,000 reward for the killer in the recent racist stabbing); what the public's reaction says about us and about health insurance companies; whether this is going to make health insurance companies do anything besides beef up security for their executives; and whether or not this is part of any turning point in our new Gilded Age of astounding wealth inequality.
Comments
So to bring these particular overlappers up to speed...
If you want for-profit health insurance, it's going to be run by for-profit corporations, who are going to do everything possible within the law to maximize profits. And, yes, that includes interpreting contracts as narrowly as possible in order to avoid payouts.
IOW it's pretty useless to scapegoat Brian Thompson for doing exactly would be expected of him in the system you yourself have demanded. It's like saying you want privated parks and playgrounds, but when you get your wish, you start complaining when they set up toll booths at the entrances and hang billboards along the pathways.
(Personal context: one thing I've noticed about all the online rhapsodizing of the shooter is how apolitical it is. I've seen hundreds of posts in support of him, but I don't think more than one or two where someone suggests that maybe certain politicians share the blame for the exploitative nature of US health insurance.)
You’re joking, right?
Fair enough.
I jolly well haven’t endorsed anything like that myself. How about “the system we’re stuck in”?
Well, I wasn't really addressing you, because I'm assuming you don't vote Republican.
People's sympathy for the shooter makes me think of all the antiheroes in our popular culture. The main character in "Breaking Bad" comes to mind.
I suppose the fact that not all heallth-insurance companies have rejection rates as high as UHC might indicate it's possible to operate within the for-profit system and not be a TOTAL jerk about these things.
Though maybe all companies would like to do the same thing, but just couldn't come up with whatever MO UnitedHealth did? If not, I wonder how they decide to draw the line between denying coverage legally, but not being too assholish about it.
I suspect I'm not the first person to observe that insurers are unique among businesses in that they make money by maximizing sales of their products, but minimizing delivery.
Well, people seem to think that the Manhattan shooter was striking a blow on behalf of the common good, whereas I don't really recall that being a thing with Walter White. From the few episodes I saw and second-hand reports, didn't the scripts tend to emphasize the harmful aspects of what he was doing?
When was the general vote over getting rid of the insurance companies? The problem in part is that they are seen as 'too big to fail', comprising a major sector of the US economy and providing a lot of jobs (many in former rust belt areas), or to put it another way:
"“Everybody who supports single-payer healthcare says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents 1 million, 2 million, 3 million jobs of people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?” (Obama, 2006)
Yeah, but the problem here is capitalism, no shade, but the insurance companies are acting in exactly the same cutthroat way as the rest of the economy.
Alleged CEO Shooter Luigi Mangione Was Radicalized by Pain -A journey through his online footprint and influences
Well, it's been obvious since 2010 that the Republicans not only oppose expansion of public health-care, but favour going backwards and eliminating the Affordable Care Act. So, yeah, that's what you're voting for if you vote Republican?
Are you suggesting that the prediction of mass unemployment in the event of single-payer is accurate? Or just that that's how it's seen?
FWIW, I don't think that's the main issue most voters are thinking of when they consciously vote against health-care reform. But it is something I've thought about. But does health-care reform have to mean single-payer?
For myself, I've lived in Canada, which is single payer, and Korea, which is hybrid, and much prefer the Korean system. Though the Korean system is still mandatory for everyone, and I don't know if adopting that system would alleviate any issue of insurance-industry workers thrown into unemployment.
I think it's probably accurate, but actually serves as an easy out for otherwise progressive politicians (or 'progressive' politicians if you like). I remember a paper published by one of the NIH's journals around 2016 critiquing Sanders policy and comparing it unfavourably with Clinton's, where the swing argument came in the middle of the paper and was around the lobbying power of the industry. There's reasonable evidence that health care companies are aware of this and this factors into where they site their employees.
It still would purely because even by the standards of insurance based systems the US model is pretty expensive and a lot of that is tied to tiered coverage and the associated amounts of administrative overhead. If you were designing an insurance system with a high probability that people would receive appropriate care in a timely manner the US model wouldn't be the one you came up with.
But fewer, as you don't need an entire bureaucracy dedicated to getting out of paying.
Or they could operate as not-for-profits, as many US health insurance companies do.
It was a single Democratic senator, Joe Lieberman, who killed the public option when the ACA was being written. If there were a public option, everyone under 65 wouldn't be at the mercy of private companies; private health insurance could have gradually shrunk as people realized the public option was better rather than eliminated overnight. Lieberman also nixed lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 55.
Also, people vote for a bunch of different reasons. It's deeply reductive to say "well, this is what you wanted."
It's also reductive to point to the profit motive and blame capitalism in general. Different health insurance companies have different rates of denying coverage. UHC makes a choice. They ignore patient's doctors, they make decisions with no reference to medical need, and they lie about it. This Propublica piece about what was unearthed when a family sued UHC is damning. https://www.propublica.org/article/unitedhealth-healthcare-insurance-denial-ulcerative-colitis
Well, just for the record, my preface went as follows...
Rest assured, I am sure there are few, if any, Shipmates who fit the category of "Republicans humming the Robin Hood theme while watching the Brian Thompson murder on endless replay."
I don't think it's reductive at all, take your comment earlier "insurance companies could decide to accept a reasonable profit", well yes, but that runs counter to the most popular interpretation of "fiduciary duty" in the US. UHC also happen to be the health care company with the largest revenue and their market cap reflects their dominance (and practically speaking denial rates of 20% - Anthem and Blue Shield - are still pretty bad).
Many years ago, I had a conversational ESL class with several medical professionals in it, and they asked if we could discuss the "morning-after pill", so I prepared a lesson on that topic for the next class.
A few minutes into the class, a young woman, unaware of the topic being discussed, walked in late, and I explained the morning-after pill with "...you take it after you have sex".
Let's just say her reaction was somewhat less than sanguine, though the misunderstanding did provide a useful opportunity to lecture on the duality of "you" in English.
Then why was Brian Thompson arguing that UHC needed to change? Fiduciary responsibility does not require companies to implement dishonest policies and practices.
Stopping sharp practice when it could threaten the bottom line is very different from the view that they should voluntarily cap their profits (and to be clear sharp practice is endemic in the industry, and from the rash of stories one could reasonably draw the inference that an ambient level of fines is seen as a cost of doing business).
There's no indication that the suspect was on 'the left'.
This stuff needs to change now. Policing the process can come later.
*blushes and takes a modest bow*
So what does "insurance companies could decide to accept a reasonable profit" even mean then? All the American insurance companies have denial rates that would be a scandal within any single payer or state insurance system. The historic direction is for the 'best' American insurance companies to become more like the 'worst' over time as they seek to 'maximise shareholder value'.
Whatever changes Thompson planned to make he was still willing to continue the rollout of further programs to deny care: https://www.yahoo.com/news/unitedhealthcare-other-insurers-ai-deny-202000141.html
Well, if you were going to transition to a single-payer system, you'd need a bunch of administrators and bureaucrats in that system, so some of those people could continue to work in health administration.
For the rest, they can get other jobs doing something productive.
Similarly, I'd love to transition to a sensible scheme for personal taxation, and put H&R Block out of business.
The new administration has Elon Musk and his buddies all excited about eliminating "government waste". Wasteful make-work is no better if it lives in a part of the private sector that we are effectively forced to used. It's the same.
The people among my friends that I am seeing cheering this on are on the left. It’s disturbing the living hell out of me.
So, it has been quite a surprise to discover from this thread that even before he had been identified, the gunman should already have become characterised in many circles as a maverick hero striking a blow for the little guy. Furthermore, it was only in the news this evening (Tuesday 10th December) that any inkling of this aspect and of such a characterisation got picked up and added to the story as reported here at all.
I was gonna say it would be reported as a novelty item and then forgotten the next day, though a google search on the relevant phrases turns up not a single precedent of someone being attacked with raw sewage.
I do recall somebody throwing a bucket of raw sewage into the Canadian House Of Commons as a protest once, but IIRC it missed hitting anyone.
Doublethink, Admin
Interesting difference in perspectives. Social media right from the start was assuming, with approval, that it was meant as a statement against the company or the industry in general, and I pretty much shared that assumption, minus the approval.
Part of the reason I rejected the cloak-and-dagger hypothesis was that, Hollywood movies aside, there really aren't a lotta cases in the developed world(*) of corporate types murdering each other to settle disputes. Jimmy Hoffa and Joseph Yablonski are really the only cases that come to mind, and they were killed by fellow labour-unionists. (Though in Yablonski's case, his killers were from the pro-management faction.)
(*) Now, western corporations in the developing world hiring local thugs to carry out violence is another story.
And is also fueling on-line conspiracy theories.
In my experience that's because most on the right don't care about the deaths of the under-insured. So anyone cheering such actions is more likely not to be Republican
It wasn't just social media. As far as I can tell no one in the police or the press or the general public ever asked the question "Why would anyone want to harm this man?" He headed a particularly rapacious health insurance company (even by the standards of American health insurance companies). He was an almost archetypal asshole victim, to borrow a phrase from TV Tropes. Virtually every American has either had to deal with delay or denial of their healthcare or the healthcare of a loved one because of the decisions of some insurance company so it's not surprising the public reacted they way it did. You can't make a fortune on the suffering of others and expect those people to greet your death with anything like sadness. I think there's a rather famous seasonally appropriate story along those lines.
Part of it is because the elites who run media companies have a lot sympathy when something bad happens to a fellow elite, and this is reflected in their coverage decisions.
Well, it's not like he tripped and broke his neck--he was murdered in cold blood.
I'm not particularly sad about his death personally. But I'm definitely not on board with literal murder. (I'm not saying anyone here is either. But unless everyone who's posting in a particularly disturbing way on certain social media platforms is only doing so out of dark-humor schadenfreude, a lot of people out there on my own political side are, and that freaks the hell out of me.)
I think it basically is just amped-up schadenfreude, based on personal dislike of the health-insurance industry. There's a difference between, on the one hand, thinking that the guy had it coming and isn't gonna get any tears from me and let's hear some good jokes about it, and, on the other, actually thinking that you would do the same thing as the killer did.
FWIW, to test the difference between online and analog reactions, today I asked the middle-aged barista at my coffee-shop what she thought about the killing, and her only reaction was that it was especially sad for the victim's family to have this happen at Christmas. Mind you, this woman is totally off-line, and largely apolitical. Plus, problems with Canadian health care don't usually involve private companies.