'Denied Coverage!' UnitedHealthcare CEO Gunned Down on NY Street

Go to the comments on videos of the shooting. Anyone posting could be the shooter.

Courtesy of Texas Public Radio

As horrible as it is to see another human being gunned down as they walk from a car to a meeting at a hotel, none of the thousands of posters on YouTube seem too upset. Brian Thompson (50), the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was gunned down shortly before 7 a.m. in midtown Manhattan by an unknown assailant. Thompson leaves behind a wife and two sons. It is indeed heartbreaking.

Thompson is not the enemy. UnitedHealthcare, however, is not a friend of Americans in need. Thompson earned $10 million a year as the company’s CEO. The company he oversaw earned $371 billion last year with $23 billion in profits, an increase of 15 percent. A significant reason the company managed to increase profits so handsomely from 2022 to 2023 comes down to the company’s cult-like obsession with minimizing payouts. It works day and night, figuring out ways to limit how much it pays per patient or simply denies patients in need.

United provided the health insurance plan for students at Penn State University. It was a large and potentially lucrative account: lots of young, healthy students paying premiums in, not too many huge medical reimbursements going out.

But one student was costing United a lot of money. Christopher McNaughton suffered from a crippling case of ulcerative colitis — an ailment that caused him to develop severe arthritis, debilitating diarrhea, numbing fatigue and life-threatening blood clots. His medical bills were running nearly $2 million a year (UnitedHealthcare Tried to Deny Coverage).

The student, Christopher McNaughton, was incapacitated. Without the medication, he could not leave his bathroom due to over 20 bouts of bloody diarrhea each morning. He could barely eat and had, for several years, eaten the same meal each day. UnitedHealthcare found a doctor who said the expensive cocktail of meds was unnecessary and suggested a much cheaper mix that had already failed McNaughton. The family rejected the older cocktail, and so United dropped him. Company officials warned McNaughton’s mother not to waste he time appealing because they would still say no.

One in seven claims made by Americans for healthcare is rejected by insurers. In only 0.1 percent of rejected claims cases, people sue. Along with Penn State, where Christopher’s parents both work, the McNaughtons went to war with United and eventually won.

Imagine how many Americans did not have a Penn State to back them? Imagine how many Americans, who are already so distraught by seeing a loved one suffer, then have to muster up the strength and courage to fight teams of lawyers and doctors to restore lost healthcare coverage.

Anyone of them could have been that person yesterday who shot Brian Thompson.

Courtesy of NYPost

There is something wrong with our society that we somehow think this is acceptable. I know most of you reading this won’t find any of this acceptable, but a lot of the wealthy in our country are okay with rejected claims. Don’t get me wrong; they aren’t raising glasses around a cozy fire “to the suckers who lost their healthcare coverage.” They just aren’t thinking about it. They know it happens and mutter, “Oh, that’s so terrible,” but they also know that a lot of the reason they are wealthy feeds this narrative: profit always comes first and people second.

That is the American way, after all, right? If it isn’t, please educate me. Tell me I am clueless as f***, but if you do, then explain like I am a six-year-old that it isn’t so.

Brian Thompson didn’t deserve to die. Brian Thompson, however, also knew that his company was killing Americans, disguised by numbers in spreadsheets, every day. By rejecting claims with the same coolness of passing on dessert at one of his $200-dollar lunches, Thompson and the employees who looked to him for leadership condemned Americans in need to misery and death every day.

America is an unfair country. It is now structured so that each citizen, a walking, talking P&L statement, must be squeezed for every ounce of profit. America is also a violent country with a severely gunned-up citizenry. As we enter the forest of fascist America led by Trump and imagined by his Project 25, how many more Americans will combine their 1st and 2nd Amendments in their pursuit of happiness and blow away CEOs walking to breakfast meetings where they plan to giggle uproariously over their increasing profits?