Opinion: Lay this election directly at the feet of Fox News By Beth Franklin - Portland Press Herald - December 10, 2024
America is paying the price for the network's assault on intellectual honesty.
The tectonic political shifts in America and the world, more than ever, require an informed, curious and critically thinking citizenry. The economy, our national security, the stability of our democracy and equal rights are at stake. However, when you consider that more Americans than ever are relying on Fox News for information, it will come as no surprise that intellectual honesty is becoming a quaint relic of the past.
Many Americans who voted for President-elect Donald Trump can’t believe that anyone in their right mind would vote for Kamala Harris, and this feeling was stoked by the former president’s calling her and all other Democrats “dangerous people” and “lunatics,” that our country was doomed if she was elected.
Further, and perhaps more critically, Harris was portrayed on Fox News in headlines like these: “Kamala rallies across the country repeating the same speech in different accents.” Search on Fox News for a straight story about Kamala Harris; you won’t find one. In 2021, The Washington Post and the University of Maryland conducted a study to see where people got their news about politics and government. Among Democrats, the sources were varied and included CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times and The Washington Post. For Republicans, there were primarily only two – local news channels and Fox News.
More importantly, the study also found that the network actively filtered what it chose to show its viewers. During the study period, CNN had extensive coverage on the coronavirus and Trump’s failure on limiting the spread of the virus, resulting in unnecessary suffering and death. On Fox News, however, coverage primarily centered on the left’s “extreme racial ideology,” with little reporting on the pandemic.
Before the election, 741 high-ranking national security officials from both parties issued a statement endorsing Harris. The letter stated, “This election is a choice between serious leadership and vengeful impulsiveness. It is a choice between democracy and authoritarianism. Vice President Harris defends America’s democratic ideals, while former President Donald Trump endangers them.” But the headline on Fox News? “National security chiefs on letter backing Kamala Harris include many who signed infamous Hunter Biden doc.”
I was born and raised in southern Mississippi and know the culture. When you travel through the South, every gas station, mom-and-pop café and gym is playing Fox News. Every hotel lobby is playing either sports or Fox News. But the people who watch Fox News never heard how Donald Trump proclaimed at a meeting of the United Nations that his administration had accomplished more than any other. And the reaction? The world leaders laughed. “Didn’t expect that reaction,” Trump said at the time. Fox News coverage? “European officials dismiss claim world leaders ‘are laughing’ at Trump, praise his ‘strong message.’”
Last week, President-elect Trump said he would impose hefty tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China, countries that collectively purchased more than $1 trillion of U.S. exports in 2023, unless drugs and migrants are stopped from entering our country. (This, even though the majority of fentanyl brought into the U.S. is brought in by U.S. citizens.) The headline on Fox News? “Trump says Mexico will stop flow of migrants after speaking with Mexican president following tariff threats.” Yeah, right.
People of all political stripes bemoan the fact that the country is so divided, that you can’t have a civil conversation about the issues of the day. But is it any wonder when almost half the country is tuned in almost exclusively to a “news” station that filters its reporting, shades the truth, and whose commentators tell outright lies to its viewing public (see the $787 million judgment for Dominion Voting Systems).
Half the country and most of the world are horrified that we’ve elected a convicted criminal and sex offender who is devoid of a moral compass. What’s the explanation? You can lay it at the feet of Fox News.
https://www.pressherald.com/2024/12/10/opinion-lay-this-election-directly-at-the-feet-of-fox-news/
Editor's Note
I have no further comments about the following series of articles about the assassination of Brian Thompson, other than "Res Ipsa Loquitor"
- SPC
The Killing of Brian Thompson
by Chris Hedges - The Chris Hedges Report - December 4, 2024
We do not yet know the motive for the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. But it would not surprise me if the killer stalked Thompson because UnitedHealthcare had denied medical coverage, or forced a family or an individual into bankruptcy, after the company failed to cover a serious illness. Insurers reject about 1 in 7 claims for treatment, often by deciding the treatment is not “medically necessary.”
Among 10 high-income nations, the United States spends the most on health care but has the worst health outcomes. Americans die four years earlier than their counterparts in other industrialized nations.
There are more than 200 million Americans who rely on private health insurance, but once they become seriously ill, they are often tossed aside, left with crippling medical bills and unable to receive adequate treatment. Exorbitant medical bills account for about 40 percent bankruptcies. Many of those driven into bankruptcy because of medical bills had medical insurance.
The revenue of six largest insurers -- Anthem, Centene, Cigna, AVS/Aetna, Humana and UnitedHealth -- have more than quadrupled from 2010 to $1.1 trillion. Combined revenues of the 3 biggest -- United, CVS/Aetna and Cigna -- have quintupled.
These corporations, in moral terms, are legally permitted to hold sick children hostage while their parents bankrupt themselves to save their sons or daughters. That many die, at the very least premature deaths, because of these policies is indisputable.
Nothing absolves the killer of Thompson, but nothing absolves those who run for-profit health care corporations that embrace a business model that destroys and terminates lives in the name of profit.
Shooting of Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare CEO, in NYC: What We Know
The chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, one of the largest U.S. health insurers, was fatally shot outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel Wednesday morning in what the police called a brazen, assassination-style slaying.
The killing set off a frantic manhunt for the masked assailant, who shot the executive, Brian Thompson, from behind as Mr. Thompson arrived at the New York Hilton Midtown on West 54th Street for an investors’ gathering.
After firing at least three shots at Mr. Thompson, 50, and hitting him in the calf and back, the shooter ran through a nearby passageway to West 55th Street, where the police said he jumped on an electric Citi Bike and rode off into Central Park.
The police are now investigating whether the gunman escaped on an unmarked e-bike, and not a Citi Bike, according to two people familiar with the investigation.
As of Thursday morning, the police were also investigating messages left on bullet casings at the scene of the shooting, according to two law enforcement officials. Authorities are running ballistics tests on the casings, which appear to have had the words “delay” and “deny” on them, the official said. While the meaning of the message was not immediately clear, “Delay, Deny, Defend” is the title of a 2010 book by Jay M. Feinman, a professor emeritus at Rutgers Law School, that discusses ways that health insurance companies avoid paying for patients’ claims.
Here’s what we know about the shooting:
Who was Brian Thompson?
Mr. Thompson became UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive in April 2021. The company, which is based in a Minneapolis suburb, is a unit of UnitedHealth Group, whose market valuation of $560 billion makes it one of the country’s largest publicly traded companies.
Mr. Thompson spent more than 20 years rising through the ranks at UnitedHealthcare, which offers insurance to companies and individuals, employs about 140,000 people and had $281 billion in revenue in 2023.
He received total compensation of $10.2 million last year, with $1 million in base pay augmented by substantial cash and stock grants. The company’s profits rose on his watch, jumping to more than $16 billion last year from $12 billion in 2021.
But amid the growth, the company and its parent also attracted scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators who accused them of systematically refusing to authorize health care procedures and treatments.
UnitedHealth Group’s size and scope have attracted the attention of the Justice Department, which is examining whether it has engaged in anti-competitive behavior.
According to regulatory filings, Mr. Thompson owned about $20 million of UnitedHealth Group shares as of late September. Bloomberg reported in April that he was one of several company executives who sold shares before the Justice Department antitrust investigation was disclosed to investors — about $15 million worth, in Mr. Thompson’s case. The company told Bloomberg at the time that the sales had been approved.
UnitedHealthcare has drawn criticism from patients, lawmakers and others over its denial of claims that have, at times, left people stuck with sizable medical bills that they have to pay out of their own pockets.
Insurers have further come under scrutiny in recent years for not releasing data on their rates of claim denials, either before or after care is delivered. Some 17 percent of people covered under Obamacare had their care denied in 2021.
UnitedHealthcare was the subject of a scathing report released by a Senate panel that documented insurers’ refusal to pay for the care of older people who suffered a fall or stroke. The report was part of Senate investigations into denial rates of private Medicare Advantage plans. Mr. Thompson’s company, in particular, was cited for a surge in denials in post-acute care when it increased to 22.7 percent in 2022 from 10.9 percent in 2020.
Before joining UnitedHealthcare, Mr. Thompson spent nearly seven years at the accounting and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, now known as PwC.
He graduated from the University of Iowa with an accounting degree in 1997 and lived in a Minneapolis suburb with his wife, Paulette R. Thompson, a physical therapist, and two children.
Why was he in Manhattan?
The shooting occurred as Mr. Thompson arrived early at the hotel to prepare for a UnitedHealthcare investors’ day gathering.
Such events, which are common for publicly traded companies, give major shareholders and analysts who track the companies a chance to hear from executives and pepper them with questions.
The New York Hilton Midtown, one of New York City’s largest hotels, is in a busy tourist area, close to the Museum of Modern Art and Rockefeller Center, where the famous Christmas tree was scheduled to be lit Wednesday night.
UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Killed in ‘Brazen, Targeted Attack,’ Police Say
The police are searching for the suspect in the fatal shooting of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, near a Midtown Manhattan hotel on Wednesday morning.
In Midtown Manhattan early this morning, 50-year-old Brian Thompson, the C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed in what appears at this early stage of our investigation to be a brazen, targeted attack. The suspect approached from behind and fired several rounds, striking the victim at least once in the back and at least once in the right calf.
How did the shooting unfold?
The killer, according to images released by the police and security-camera footage, was a man wearing a dark hooded jacket, a gray backpack and a mask covering the bottom of his face.
Apparently knowing which door Mr. Thompson planned to enter, the shooter arrived outside the hotel about 10 minutes before his intended target and ignored passers-by as he lay in wait.
As Mr. Thompson, in a blue suit, walked toward the hotel entrance, the shooter approached him from behind and fired at least three shots with a pistol that appeared to be fitted with a silencer. The pistol jammed during the shooting, but the gunman cleared the jam quickly and continued firing.
Struck by the bullets, Mr. Thompson took several steps, turned to face his assailant and then collapsed on the sidewalk.
With his victim crumpled against a wall, the shooter walked toward him slowly. He seemed to point the gun at Mr. Thompson one more time, then walked away. He began to run only as he was crossing the street.
Where does the investigation stand?
The police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, who was sworn into the job just 10 days ago, said her department would “not rest until we identify and apprehend the shooter in this case.”
Officers recovered a cellphone near the shooting site, and detectives were conducting a forensic analysis to see whether it was linked to the killing, the police said.
Investigators were also expected to comb through footage from the many security cameras on the surrounding blocks that might offer leads as to where the shooter came from and where he went, as well as possible images of his face.
One place he apparently stopped before the shooting was a nearby Starbucks on Sixth Avenue. Several images released by the police from inside the coffee shop showed what appeared to be a man dressed the same way as the shooter.
The attacker’s means of escape could also offer clues. Citi Bike riders must use a debit or credit card to unlock a bicycle, and the dock locations and times at which bikes are removed and returned are also recorded.
Investigators were also examining Mr. Thompson’s background for signs of a possible motive.
He had recently received several threats, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation; the source and precise nature of the threats was unclear.
Live Updates: Suspect in Killing of Insurance C.E.O. May Have Left Messages on Bullet Casings
The police are using dogs, drones and New York City’s vast array of private and city cameras to track down the person who shot Brian Thompson outside a Midtown hotel.
by Alyce McFadden, Corey Kilgannon, Kate Phillips, Chelsia Rose Marcius and William Rashbaum, Chelsia Rose Marcius and Maria Cramer, Maria Cramer, Jordyn Holman, Annie Correal, Claire Fahy, Reed Abelson - NYT - December 5, 2024
New York police are investigating messages left on bullet casings at the scene of the fatal shooting of the chief executive of one of the country’s largest health insurers outside a hotel in Midtown Manhattan, according to two law enforcement officials.
The shooter appeared to have targeted the UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, 50, waiting for him early Wednesday morning before firing several shots, leaving him crumpled and dying on the pavement.
While ballistics testing was continuing on the casings, officials said they appear to have been inscribed with words including “delay” and “deny” — possible references to ways that health insurance companies seek to avoid paying patients’ claims. UnitedHealthcare has come under fierce criticism from patients, lawmakers and others for its denials of claims.
Police officers, dogs and drones fanned out across the city after the attack, seeking a suspect captured on multiple surveillance videos wearing a dark hooded jacket, a black face-covering and a gray backpack.
“Every indication is that this was a premeditated, preplanned, targeted attack,” the city’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said at a news conference on Wednesday.
Investigators will use a trail of digital evidence, tapping into the records of nearly ubiquitous surveillance cameras to help search for a suspect they called “proficient” with firearms. Police officers recovered a cellphone near the scene of the attack and are exploring whether it is connected to the shooting, the police said.
The police are offering a $10,000 reward for information about Mr. Thompson’s killing, and said they are also exploring his background and social media for clues. Mr. Thompson had recently received several threats, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation. The police are still investigating the source and exact nature of those threats, the official said.
Here’s what else to know:
Doubt on Citi Bike theory: The police are investigating whether the gunman escaped on an unmarked e-bike, not a Citi Bike as officials had previously said, according to two people familiar with the investigation. A spokesman for Lyft, which operates Citi Bike in New York, said late Wednesday that the company had been informed that the gunman did not use a Citi Bike, though the Police Department has not confirmed that.
A city of surveillance: The police will scour a vast network of private and city cameras to trace the shooter’s movements. Already, images of the gunman in the moments before and after the attack show some of his actions: first stopping at a Starbucks, then waiting outside the hotel for Mr. Thompson and shortly afterward fleeing on a bicycle into Central Park.
UnitedHealthcare, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, has come under fierce criticism from patients, lawmakers and others for denying patients’ claims. A doctor or hospital may determine that a patient needs medical treatment, but an insurer, which is responsible for paying for that treatment, can still determine that the care does not meet its criteria for coverage and refuse to pay the bill. In some cases, the denial comes in the form of a refusal to authorize the care before it is delivered, but in other cases, patients can be left with hefty medical bills that they must pay out of their own pockets.
Chelsia Rose Marcius and William Rashbaum
The police are now investigating apparent messages left on bullet casings at the scene of the shooting, according to two law enforcement officials. Ballistics testing is continuing, the official said, but the casings appear to have been inscribed with words including “delay” and “deny” — potentially references to ways that health insurance companies seek to avoid paying patients’ claims.
Chelsia Rose Marcius and Maria Cramer
The police are now investigating whether the gunman escaped on an unmarked e-bike, not a Citi Bike as officials had previously said, according to two people familiar with the investigation. A spokesman for Lyft, which operates Citi Bike in New York, said late Wednesday that the company had been informed that the gunman did not use a Citi Bike, though the Police Department has not confirmed that.
The cameras caught the gunman standing alone for five minutes on West 54th Street, ignoring the early-morning rush of people streaming by.
They caught him again as he stood in the dark at 6:44 a.m. and locked onto his target, Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, who was walking on the other side of the street.
And they captured video of the gunman, who was dressed in black and wearing a gray backpack, crossing the street and walking up to Mr. Thompson. He appeared calm as he raised a gun, fired several times and then walked away.
The seconds before Wednesday morning’s shooting of Mr. Thompson, the fatal moments and the immediate aftermath were all captured on surveillance cameras, leaving investigators with a trail of digital evidence to help search for a man who was “proficient” with firearms, according to Joseph Kenny, the chief of detectives for the New York Police Department.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Police Department, with help from the federal government, poured resources into expanding its surveillance capabilities. New York City now has a vast system of cameras, both public and private, that the police can scour to locate people.
The city has “investigatory capabilities that are above and beyond most municipalities,” said Brittney Blair, a senior director in the investigations and disputes practice at K2 Integrity, which advises companies on risk management and security.
On Wednesday, cameras inside a Starbucks two blocks from the crime scene that the gunman visited minutes before the shooting captured his partially hidden face.
Others showed the gunman waiting for Mr. Thompson, and then recorded him fleeing on a bicycle into Central Park, where he disappeared.
By late Wednesday, the police had released at least five images of the suspect, but had not announced arrests. They had not identified the shooter or a motive.
Jeffrey Maddrey, the chief of department, said the police would use its aviation unit, dogs and drones to find the killer.
Investigators would work backward to create a timeline, talking to Mr. Thompson’s friends, colleagues and family, scrutinizing his social media accounts and analyzing surveillance footage around Midtown, the police said.
“An incident like this happens, we don’t spare any expense,” Chief Maddrey said.
The footage revealed a chilling encounter between the seemingly calm gunman and an unsuspecting executive from Minnesota.
The gunman raised the weapon, heedless of a woman standing nearby on the sidewalk. He fired several times, hitting Mr. Thompson in the calf and back, as the woman ran away, according to the footage.
Mr. Thompson barely had time to whirl and face his attacker before crumpling to the ground. The gunman fiddled with his weapon, which had appeared to jam, and shot again as he walked toward Mr. Thompson.
As Mr. Thompson lay bleeding, the gunman jogged across 54th Street and fled through a pedestrian passageway near the Ziegfeld Ballroom before appearing again on West 55th Street. The police would later find a cellphone in that passage.
Then, he got on a bike that he rode north, Chief Kenny said. At 6:48 a.m., at the same time that the police found Mr. Thompson dying on the sidewalk, the shooter was riding into Central Park on Center Drive. That was the last time he was seen, the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said.
Later Wednesday, police officers gathered at a Citi Bike kiosk at Madison Avenue and 82nd Street on the Upper East Side. They were asking doormen and building superintendents nearby for video footage that might have captured activity around the dock.
Despite the ubiquity of cameras across the five boroughs, seemingly tracking New Yorkers’ every move, the police have not always been able to harness their collective power to find suspects quickly.
In April 2022, after Frank James opened fire on a packed Brooklyn subway train during midweek rush hour, it took more than 31 hours for officers to track him down even though he had been captured on surveillance video.
Members of the public eventually tipped the police off to his whereabouts: A 17-year-old boy on a school field trip in Chinatown spotted Mr. James in a park, and then a different caller told investigators that he was at a McDonald’s in the East Village. Mr. James was eventually arrested near Sixth Street and First Avenue.
“It’s never as speedy as you would want it to be or like they show on TV,” said Ms. Blair of K2 Integrity.
“Those investigations are extremely tedious,” said Ms. Blair, who is a former director of intelligence operations at the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in Chicago. “It takes analysis of tens of thousands of hours of footage from all different camera sources.”
Even with New York’s level of technology and surveillance, the police must rely on investigators who are keen observers and can identify someone by looking at their shape and movements, Ms. Blair said. And the public remains a critical ally of the police, who distribute images and descriptions of suspects in the hope that someone will help identify them, she said.
“There is no magic button you can press to immediately identify someone like this,” Ms. Blair said.
“But,” she added, “of all the places in this country to commit a crime like this, Manhattan would be the dead last location on my list.”
Claire Fahy, Corey Kilgannon and Chelsia Rose Marcius contributed reporting.
Corporate security officers from around the world meet in the wake of the Midtown shooting.
Dozens of chief security officers from Fortune 500 corporations around the world joined a video call on Wednesday afternoon, hours after the fatal shooting of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Brian Thompson in Midtown Manhattan, to discuss additional protective measures for executives moving around the area, according to a security expert who participated in the conversation.
The discussion included best practices and reviews of executive protection programs, according to the expert, Dave Komendat, a retired chief security officer at Boeing and president of DSKomendat Risk Management Services, a consultancy based in the Seattle area. He said that all of the security officers on the video call were facing upper-echelon requests for presentations on the current state of their security programs and scrutinizing their own practices.
“Many of my colleagues today are sitting down with their executive protection team leaders, their security leadership teams, and re-evaluating what they are doing and not doing,” he said.
Mr. Komendat declined to name any of the companies that participated. But he outlined common practices in the field of corporate security.
He said that security officers use open source information and routinely scour the internet to check references for their executives and see how their company is being discussed in online forums, Mr. Komendat said.
Some companies provide physical protection to executives as well, Mr. Komendat said, but “there is no real standard for this.” It was not clear on Wednesday if Mr. Thompson had physical protection from security firms during his stay in New York.
Health care industry executives, like those in the insurance and defense industries, face increased risks “because of the services that are being provided and the emotion that comes along with some of those services,” Mr. Komendat said.
Corporate security officers from around the world meet in the wake of the Midtown shooting.
Dozens of chief security officers from Fortune 500 corporations around the world joined a video call on Wednesday afternoon, hours after the fatal shooting of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Brian Thompson in Midtown Manhattan, to discuss additional protective measures for executives moving around the area, according to a security expert who participated in the conversation.
The discussion included best practices and reviews of executive protection programs, according to the expert, Dave Komendat, a retired chief security officer at Boeing and president of DSKomendat Risk Management Services, a consultancy based in the Seattle area. He said that all of the security officers on the video call were facing upper-echelon requests for presentations on the current state of their security programs and scrutinizing their own practices.
“Many of my colleagues today are sitting down with their executive protection team leaders, their security leadership teams, and re-evaluating what they are doing and not doing,” he said.
Mr. Komendat declined to name any of the companies that participated. But he outlined common practices in the field of corporate security.
He said that security officers use open source information and routinely scour the internet to check references for their executives and see how their company is being discussed in online forums, Mr. Komendat said.
Some companies provide physical protection to executives as well, Mr. Komendat said, but “there is no real standard for this.” It was not clear on Wednesday if Mr. Thompson had physical protection from security firms during his stay in New York.
Health care industry executives, like those in the insurance and defense industries, face increased risks “because of the services that are being provided and the emotion that comes along with some of those services,” Mr. Komendat said.
It’s the quintessential Manhattan hotel, somehow both drab and sleek, an emblem of the gray and glass aesthetic of the city that appears in thousands of beloved Hollywood films and series. The Midtown Hilton — or technically, the New York Hilton Midtown — is one of the city’s largest hotels, and the largest Hilton in the continental United States, with nearly 2,000 rooms.
Nestled inconspicuously on West 54th Street, among the marble towers of Sixth Avenue, not far from the Museum of Modern Art and Rockefeller Center, it has hosted the Emmy Awards, Donald Trump’s victory speech in 2016, Elvis Presley, the Beatles and the journalists who holed up in its rooms with the Pentagon Papers. It has appeared in sitcoms and films, from “Seinfeld” to “Michael Clayton.” And has generally seen history go by since opening its doors in the 1960s, in addition to countless corporate conferences.
And early on Wednesday morning, it became the backdrop for a high-profile killing, when a man gunned down Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, near an entrance, before fleeing on a bicycle.
“Someone got shot outside,” an attendee of a conference was overheard saying on his way upstairs, where people were chatting over cups of coffee before the day’s events began. It seemed like just another day of business-minded mingling in New York.
That someone would turn out to be Mr. Thompson, a head of one of the nation’s largest health insurers, and one of the scheduled speakers at the event, the UnitedHealth Group’s Investor Conference 2024. As attendees gathered, news crews were massing on the street below, the police were searching for the hooded shooter, and, at Mount Sinai West, a hospital just uptown, Mr. Thompson, 50, was dead after sustaining gunshot wounds.
As the news spread, the conference was called off, attendees pulled off their lanyards and headed for the exits, carry-on luggage in tow.
Mark Sanders, the general manager of the New York Hilton Midtown, said in an email that the hotel staff was shaken by the crime. “We are deeply saddened by this morning’s events in the area and our thoughts are with all affected by the tragedy,” he said.
But at the hotel, by necessity, life paused, then went on. A hotel is meant to be calm — this one in particular perhaps, serving if not as an oasis, then a carpeted pocket of quiet against the volume of Midtown, with its coffee carts and taxi cabs, its sidewalks jammed with tourists and men and women walking, head down, in suits. The hotel staff, in its heavily trafficked lobby, projects an aura of having seen it all, and having looked away.
Though yellow police tape closed off a section of West 54th Street just outside a side entrance, hotel guests continued traipsing in and out of the main entrance on Wednesday morning. Natasha Reyes, a cashier at the gift shop, said that she had arrived about an hour before the shooting, and never heard anything at all.
This is probably how it was when other major events were happening around the hotel. When, for example, Mr. Presley, in a baby-blue suit, was giving an interview in a ballroom. Or when Neil Sheehan and his colleagues from The New York Times booked several rooms to compile the story on the leaked government report that would roil the nation with its revelations about the Vietnam War. Or when an engineer from Motorola placed the first call ever made from a handheld cellular phone from the sidewalk outside.
Hotels are meant to absorb whatever happens. If there is conflict or even tragedy, they are just the backdrop.
Brian Thompson spent more than 20 years climbing through the ranks at UnitedHealthcare, one of the nation’s largest health insurers and a main division of the conglomerate UnitedHealth Group, and there were no signs that his ascent was slowing.
He had been chief executive of the insurance division since 2021, overseeing a period of substantial profits. The division reported $281 billion in revenues last year, providing coverage to millions of Americans through the health plans it sold to individuals, employers and people under government programs like Medicare. The division employed roughly 140,000 people.
Mr. Thompson’s killing on Wednesday outside a midtown Manhattan hotel as he was walking toward the UnitedHealth Group’s annual investor day sent shock waves through the nation’s vast health care sector. The fatal shooting elicited an outpouring of sympathy from rival insurers, executives, health care providers and others.
During Mr. Thompson’s tenure as chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, the company’s profits rose, with earnings from operations topping $16 billion in 2023 from $12 billion in 2021. Mr. Thompson received a total compensation package last year of $10.2 million, a combination of $1 million in base pay and cash and stock grants.
He oversaw significant growth in one of the company’s key businesses, the sale of private insurance plans under Medicare Advantage, a program mainly for those 65 and older that receives federal funds and now covers roughly half of the 61 million people signing up.
“He sure as heck had a lot of role in the proliferation of Medicare Advantage,” said Matt Burns, a former United executive who spent several years working for Mr. Thompson, whom colleagues knew as BT.
Mr. Thompson grew up in Jewell, Iowa, where his father, the late Dennis Thompson, worked for decades as a grain elevator operator. From a modest background, Mr. Thompson had achieved executive status but remained open and approachable, Mr. Burns said. When asked to develop a long-term plan for the company, he solicited input from top executives and then synthesized their views. “That speaks to how inherently sharp he was and how well he knew the business,” Mr. Burns said.
Steve Nelson, the president of Aetna and a former chief executive at UnitedHealthcare, worked with Mr. Thompson for close to a decade. “He actually was the smartest guy in the room, without being annoying,” Mr. Nelson said of his former colleague, who described his self-deprecating sense of humor. “He would make fun of himself a lot,” Mr. Nelson said, who said Mr. Thompson was an amateur wrestler who liked to challenge colleagues to arm wrestling.
He was also well-regarded by Wall Street analysts, where he was known for his reassuring descriptions of the company’s outlook.
On a recent call with Wall Street analysts and investors to discuss the company’s financial results, Mr. Thompson provided a confident voice when questioned. When asked about the employer segment, he told one analyst, “I feel really good about not only our performance, but our cost management inside our commercial business.”
Mr. Thompson had presided over the division as it faced multiple inquiries and has been criticized by congressional lawmakers and federal regulators who accused it of systematically denying authorization for health care procedures and treatments.
The insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group has also been under federal scrutiny because the parent company was the victim of a broad cyberattack on its billing and payment system, Change Healthcare. Private information, including health data, from more than 100 million Americans was compromised in the ransomware attack. The parent company paid $22 million in ransom in an effort to stop the hackers.
UnitedHealth Group has a sprawling dominance over nearly every segment of health care, and it is one of the nation’s largest companies overall, with $372 billion in revenue last year. But its massive size and scope have attracted the attention of the Justice Department, which is looking into whether the company has engaged in any anti-competitive behavior. The company’s proposed acquisition of a major home care company recently resulted in a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department and four state attorneys general seeking to block the deal.
In addition, Bloomberg News reported that several of UnitedHealth Group’s executives sold stock. According to regulatory filings, Mr. Thompson owned about $20 million of shares in the parent company as of late September. In April, Bloomberg reported that he was one of at least four executives at the company who had sold shares before the Justice Department antitrust investigation was disclosed to the company’s investors — about $15 million worth in Mr. Thompson’s case. The company told Bloomberg at the time that the sales had been approved.
After Mr. Thompson joined UnitedHealth Group in 2004, he rose steadily, taking on various finance roles and eventually overseeing the company’s government plans offered to people who qualify for Medicare or Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor. United’s management of those plans has also been scrutinized by the federal government.
Those who worked with him during that time said he was responsive to concerns about how to serve the individuals in those programs. “Every interaction with him felt extremely genuine,” said Antonio Ciaccia, a consultant who discussed using pharmacists to help provide better care for people receiving Medicaid. “He was a very good listener.”
Before he went to work at United, Mr. Thompson spent nearly seven years at PricewaterhouseCoopers, also known as PwC, the large accounting firm. He graduated from the University of Iowa with a bachelor’s degree in business administration with an accounting major in May 1997.
A number of the insurer’s rivals and analysts said they were shocked by the news of his killing, and praised his management style.
“It’s a very dark day for all of health care,” said Michael Ha, an analyst at Baird who was at the investor conference on Wednesday. “He was so smart, talented leader, very well-respected, with such a bright future as a health care leader.”
Gail Boudreaux, the chief executive of Elevance Health, said that overseeing health care organizations “is marked by dedication, compassion and a profound commitment to improving lives, and Brian embodied these qualities and more.’’
“I knew him to be a visionary leader who developed innovative ideas to take on some of the nation’s greatest challenges,” said Kim Keck, the chief executive of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, which represents Blue Cross plans. “His death is a great loss for our country and for the health care industry.”
Mr. Nelson of Aetna said he would not speculate about any motive for Mr. Thompson’s murder, but he noted that insurance executives are sometimes the target of people’s frustrations with the health care system.
“I’m not going to say that it comes with the territory, because that’s ridiculous,” he said. “Nobody should ever feel their life is threatened for doing their job.”
In a video sent to UnitedHealth employees, Andrew Witty, the parent company’s chief executive, said: “Brian was a truly extraordinary person who touched the lives of countless people throughout our organization and far beyond. It’s a terrible tragedy.” The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the video message.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, the company said it was working closely with the New York Police Department. “Our hearts go out to Brian’s family and all who were close to him,” the company said.
Mr. Thompson lived with his family in a suburb of Minneapolis. He is survived by his wife, Paulette R. Thompson, a physical therapist who works for a Minnesota health system, and two children.
Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing
The shooting death of a UnitedHealthcare executive in Manhattan has unleashed Americans’ frustrations with an industry that often denies coverage and reimbursement for medical claims.
Dionne Searcey and Madison Malone Kircher- NYT - December 5, 2024
Messages found on bullet casings at the scene of the Wednesday shooting — “delay” and “deny” — are two words familiar to many Americans who have interacted with insurance companies.
The fatal shooting on Wednesday of a top UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, on a Manhattan sidewalk has unleashed a torrent of morbid glee from patients and others who say they have had negative experiences with health insurance companies at some of the hardest times of their lives.
It is unclear what motivated the incident or whether it was tied to Mr. Thompson’s work in the insurance industry. The police have yet to identify the shooter who is still on the loose.
But that did not stop social media commenters from leaping to conclusions and from showing a blatant lack of sympathy over the death of a man who was a husband and father of two children.
“Thoughts and deductibles to the family,” read one comment underneath a video of the shooting posted online by CNN. “Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.”
On TikTok, one user wrote, “I’m an ER nurse and the things I’ve seen dying patients get denied for by insurance makes me physically sick. I just can’t feel sympathy for him because of all of those patients and their families.”
The dark commentary after the death of Mr. Thompson, a 50-year-old insurance executive from Maple Grove, Minn., highlighted the anger and frustration over the state of health care in America, where those with private insurance often find themselves in Kafka-esque tangles while seeking reimbursement for medical treatment and are often denied.
Messages that law enforcement officials say were found on bullet casings at the scene of the shooting in front of a Midtown hotel — “delay” and “deny” — are two words familiar to many Americans who have interacted with insurance companies for almost anything other than routine doctor visits.
Mr. Thompson was chief executive of his company’s insurance division, which reported $281 billion in revenue last year, providing coverage to millions of Americans through the health plans it sold to individuals, employers and people under government programs like Medicare. The division employs roughly 140,000 people.
Mr. Thompson received a $10.2 million compensation package last year, a combination of $1 million in base pay and cash and stock grants. He was shot to death as he was walking toward the annual investor day for UnitedHealth Group, UnitedHealthcare’s parent company.
Stephan Meier, the chair of the management division at Columbia Business School, said the attack could send shock waves through the broader health insurance industry.
About seven chief executives of publicly traded companies die each year, he said, but almost always from health complications or accidents. A targeted attack could have much larger implications.
“The insurance industry is not the most loved, to put it mildly,” Mr. Meier said. “If you’re a C-suite executive of another insurance company, I would be thinking, What’s this mean for me? Am I next?”
A longtime employee of UnitedHealthcare said that workers at the company had been aware for years that members were unhappy. Mr. Thompson was one of the few executives who wanted to do something about it, said the employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the company does not allow workers to speak publicly without permission.
In speeches to employees, Mr. Thompson spoke about the need to change the state of health care coverage in the country and the culture of the company, topics other executives avoided, the employee said.
Already, there is heightened concern among some public-facing health care companies, said Eric Sean Clay, the president of the International Association for Healthcare Security and Safety. The trade group includes members that offer security to some of the largest health care companies in North America.
“The C.E.O.s are quite often the most visible face of an organization,” he said. “Sometimes people hate on that individual, and wish to do them harm.”
But few health care companies provide security for their executives, he said, in part to avoid bad optics, or because it may seem unnecessary.
In the hours after the shooting early Wednesday morning, social media exploded with anger toward the insurance industry and Mr. Thompson.
“I pay $1,300 a month for health insurance with an $8,000 deductible. ($23,000 yearly) When I finally reached that deductible, they denied my claims. He was making a million dollars a month,” read one comment on TikTok.
Another commenter wrote, “This needs to be the new norm. EAT THE RICH.”
“The ambulance ride to the hospital probably won’t be covered,” wrote a commenter on a TikTok video in which another user featured an audio clip from the Netflix show “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.” In it, the queen makes a dramatic show of faux sorrow over a death.
The shooting prompted a wrenching outpouring of patients and family members who also posted horror stories of insurance claim reimbursement stagnation and denials.
One woman expressed frustration with trying to get a special bed for her disabled son covered by UnitedHealthcare. Another user described struggling with bills and coverage after giving birth.
“It is so stressful,” the user said in a video. “I was sick over this.”
Stefanos Chen and Maria Cramer contributed reporting, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/nyregion/social-media-insurance-industry-brian-thompson.html
Killing of Brian Thompson Sets Off Fear Among Executives Already Worried About Safety
by Emma Goldberg - NYT - December 6, 2024
A Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company raised its drug prices, and then board members and executives received phone calls threatening violence. A health care company’s board meeting was disrupted after board members were targeted in “swatting” attacks that wrongly sent law enforcement officers to their homes.
These incidents happened before the fatal shooting of Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive, in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday. The police had not offered a motive for the shooting as of Thursday night, or said it was related to Mr. Thompson’s work in the insurance industry.
The killing, however, stunned business leaders, some of whom were already concerned about safety. Over the last five years, there has been a sharp rise in targeted attacks, digital and offline, of executives and their families, said Chris Pierson, the chief executive of BlackCloak, a digital executive protection firm. Health care, biomedical and pharmaceutical leaders tend to be targeted more often than executives in other industries, according to the firm’s data.
Digital platforms have made it easier to obtain information about executives’ identities and locations, while social media has fanned the flames of vitriol directed at these corporate leaders.
Businesses have been increasing their spending on protection: The median amount spent on executive security among the S&P 500 companies that disclose that information doubled from 2021 to 2023, according to Equilar, an executive compensation research firm.
Because of how frequently threats circulate online, companies and security firms must spend time and effort sorting threats by the severity of threatened harm, the likelihood of an attack and the capacity of the individual making the threat, Mr. Pierson said.
While some social media users responded to the news of Mr. Thompson’s killing with anger and schadenfreude, posting their frustrations about being denied reimbursement for crucial medical treatments, many corporate leaders shared a sense of fear at seeing a not particularly prominent executive fatally gunned down on a Manhattan street.
“My wife was like, ‘Why would someone kill a C.E.O.?’ I’m like, any C.E.O. has people who don’t like them. C.E.O.s have to let people go. C.E.O.s have people competing with their business,” said Seth Besmertnik, chief executive of a software company whose office is also in Manhattan.
Brad Karp, chairman of the law firm Paul, Weiss, said, “It was chilling and disturbing to see the assassination captured on video, two blocks from my office.”
For some chief executives, the shooting is a wake-up call: Political leaders aren’t the only ones who need to be on high alert about their personal safety. Many are now scrambling to do more.
Leaders at Allied Universal, which provides security services for 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies, said their phones were “ringing off the hook” on Wednesday with potential clients. Allied covers a wide spectrum of services — including stationing guards outside offices, chauffeuring executives, surveilling their homes and tracking their families.
Protecting a chief executive full time costs roughly $250,000 a year, said Glen Kucera, who runs Allied’s enhanced protection services.
This month, dozens of Fortune 1000 chief executives will gather for a summit in Midtown, at the Ziegfeld on 54th Street, steps away from where United Healthcare’s chief executive was shot.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who runs Yale’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute and will convene the summit, received a barrage of phone calls on Wednesday with questions about safety at the event. Mr. Sonnenfeld said city police and private guards would be stationed at the summit, a decision that was made before Wednesday’s shooting, though in the past he has not worried about a security presence at the event, which has been held for more than 30 years.
“From the left and the right we’ve seen the frightening, uncanny conversion of angry and deranged people,” Mr. Sonnenfeld said. “Leaders in the corporate world are convenient targets.”
Ranjay Gulati, a Harvard Business School professor, noted that while people were often frustrated with businesses — take Purdue Pharma and its role in the opioid crisis or BP and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill — it was shocking to see that anger lead to violence.
“There’s a latent undercurrent here of how frustrated people are with the health care industry,” Mr. Gulati said. “I’m not condoning the action in any way, but there’s a lot of soul-searching we have to do about an industry that consumes nearly 20 percent of our G.D.P. and yet our outcomes are not nearly as good as countries that spend half as much.”
The police said bullet casings found at the site of the killing appeared to have the words “deny” and “delay” written on them — terms familiar to people seeking coverage for medical procedures.
Kathryn Wylde, the chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit representing the city’s business community, said Mayor Eric Adams called her early Wednesday and told her that the shooting appeared to have been targeted rather than random, asking her to notify members of the partnership.
Next week, the Partnership for New York City will host the city’s new police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, at its annual meeting. Ms. Wylde said that business leaders had been focused on public safety in the city more broadly, but that the shooting of Mr. Thompson could prompt a deeper conversation about the personal security of chief executives.
“It’s reasonable to think that violent rhetoric can lead to tragic results,” Ms. Wylde said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/business/brian-thompson-insurance-executives-threats.html
The Rage and Glee That Followed a C.E.O.’s Killing Should Ring All Alarms
Zeynep Tufekci - NYT - Secember 6, 2024
It started barely minutes after the horrifying news broke that the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, had been fatally shot in Midtown Manhattan. Even before any details were available, the internet was awash in speculation that the company had refused to cover the alleged killer’s medical bills — and in debates about whether murder would be a reasonable response.
Soon there was a video of a man in a hoodie, face not visible, walking up behind Thompson and shooting him multiple times, ignoring a woman standing nearby before walking away. Could he be a hit man?
Then came the reports that bullet casings bearing the words “delay,” “deny” and “depose” were found at the scene. “Delay” and “deny” clearly echo tactics insurers use to avoid paying claims. “Depose”? Well, that’s the sudden, forceful removal from a high position. Ah.
After that, it was an avalanche.
The shooter was compared to John Q, the desperate fictional father who takes an entire emergency room hostage after a health insurance company refuses to cover his son’s lifesaving transplant in a 2002 film of the same name. Some posted “prior authorization needed before thoughts and prayers.” Others wryly pointed out that the reward for information connected to the murder, $10,000, was less than their annual deductibles. One observer recommended that Thompson be scheduled to see a specialist in a few months, maybe.
Many others went further. They urged people with information about the killing not to share it with the authorities. Names and photos of other health insurance executives floated around. Some of the posts that went most viral, racking up millions of views by celebrating the killing, I can’t repeat here.
It’s true that any news with shock value would get some of this response online — after all, trolling, engagement bait and performative provocation are part of everyday life on digital platforms.
But this was something different. The rage that people felt at the health insurance industry, and the elation that they expressed at seeing it injured, was widespread and organic. It was shocking to many, but it crossed communities all along the political spectrum and took hold in countless divergent cultural clusters.
Even on Facebook, a platform where people do not commonly hide behind pseudonyms, the somber announcement by UnitedHealth Group that it was “deeply saddened and shocked at the passing of our dear friend and colleague” was met with, as of this writing, 80,000 reactions; 75,000 of them were the “haha” emoji.
Politicians offering boilerplate condolences were eviscerated. Some responses came in the form of personal testimony. I don’t condone murder, many started, before describing harrowing ordeals that health insurance companies had put them through.
On a prominent Reddit forum for medical professionals, one of the most upvoted comments was a parody rejection letter: After “a careful review of the claim submitted for emergency services on December 4, 2024,” it read, a claim was denied because “you failed to obtain prior authorization before seeking care for the gunshot wound to your chest.” Just a few days earlier, the forum had been a place where people debated the side effects of Flomax and the best medical conferences.
I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated.
The conditions that gave rise to this outpouring of anger are in some ways specific to this moment. Today’s business culture enshrines the maximization of executive wealth and shareholder fortunes, and has succeeded in leveraging personal riches into untold political influence. New communication platforms allow millions of strangers around the world to converse in real time.
But the currents we are seeing are expressions of something more fundamental. We’ve been here before. And it wasn’t pretty.
The Gilded Age, the tumultuous period between roughly 1870 and 1900, was also a time of rapid technological change, of mass immigration, of spectacular wealth and enormous inequality. The era got its name from a Mark Twain novel: gilded, rather than golden, to signify a thin, shiny surface layer. Below it lay the corruption and greed that engulfed the country after the Civil War.
The era survives in the public imagination through still-resonant names, including J.P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt; through their mansions, which now greet awe-struck tourists; and through TV shows with extravagant interiors and lavish gowns. Less well remembered is the brutality that underlay that wealth — the tens of thousands of workers, by some calculations, who lost their lives to industrial accidents, or the bloody repercussions they met when they tried to organize for better working conditions.
Also less well remembered is the intensity of political violence that erupted. The vast inequities of the era fueled political movements that targeted corporate titans, politicians, judges and others for violence. In 1892, an anarchist tried to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick after a drawn-out conflict between Pinkerton security guards and workers. In 1901, an anarchist sympathizer assassinated President William McKinley. And so on.
As the historian Jon Grinspan wrote about the years between 1865 and 1915, “the nation experienced one impeachment, two presidential elections ‘won’ by the loser of the popular vote and three presidential assassinations.” And neither political party, he added, seemed “capable of tackling the systemic issues disrupting Americans’ lives.” No, not an identical situation, but the description does resonate with how a great many people feel about the direction of the country today.
It’s not hard to see how, during the Gilded Age, armed political resistance could find many eager recruits and even more numerous sympathetic observers. And it’s not hard to imagine how the United States could enter another such cycle.
A recent Reuters investigation identified at least 300 cases of political violence since the 2021 assault on the Capitol, which it described as “the biggest and most sustained increase in U.S. political violence since the 1970s.” A 2023 poll showed that the number of Americans who agree with the statement “American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save the country” was ticking up alarmingly.
And the fraying of the social contract is getting worse. Americans express less and less trust in many institutions. Substantial majorities of people say that government, business leaders and the media are purposely misleading them. In striking contrast to older generations, majorities of younger people say they do not believe that “the American dream” is achievable anymore. The health insurance industry likes to cite polls that show overall satisfaction, but those numbers go down when people get sick and learn what their insurer is and is not willing to do for them.
Things are much better now than in the 19th century. But there is a similarity to the trajectory and the mood, to the expression of deep powerlessness and alienation.
Now, however, the country is awash in powerful guns. And some of the new technologies that will be deployed to help preserve order can cut both ways. Thompson’s killer apparently knew exactly where to find his target and at exactly what time. No evidence has emerged that he had access to digital tracking data, but that information is out there on the market. How long before easily built artificial-intelligence-powered drones equipped with facial recognition cameras, rather than hooded men with backpacks, seek targets in cities and towns?
The turbulence and violence of the Gilded Age eventually gave way to comprehensive social reform. The nation built a social safety net, expanded public education and erected regulations and infrastructure that greatly improved the health and well-being of all Americans.
Those reforms weren’t perfect, and they weren’t the only reason the violence eventually receded (though never entirely disappeared), but they moved us forward.
The concentration of extreme wealth in the United States has recently surpassed that of the Gilded Age. And the will among politicians to push for broad public solutions appears to have all but vanished. I fear that instead of an era of reform, the response to this act of violence and to the widespread rage it has ushered into view will be limited to another round of retreat by the wealthiest. Corporate executives are already reportedly beefing up their security. I expect more of them to move to gated communities, entrenched beyond even higher walls, protected by people with even bigger guns. Calls for a higher degree of public surveillance or for integrating facial recognition algorithms into policing may well follow. Almost certainly, armed security entourages and private jets will become an even more common element of executive compensation packages, further removing routine contact between the extremely wealthy and the rest of us, except when employed to serve them.
We still don’t know who killed Brian Thompson or what his motive was. Whatever facts eventually emerge, the anger it has laid bare will still be real, and what we glimpsed should ring all the alarm bells.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/opinion/united-health-care-ceo-shooting.html
Slain UnitedHealth CEO faced ongoing court battles, threats
Before UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in Midtown Manhattan this week, he was steering his company through court battles and legislative threats at a time of public frustration over health insurance industry tactics.
UnitedHealthcare’s parent company — which generates $400 billion in annual revenue — has been under increasing scrutiny by lawmakers and federal officials for allegedly hurting consumers with monopolistic practices. Some Democratic lawmakers have accused UnitedHealthcare of intentionally denying claims to boost profits. And Thompson himself has been accused of insider trading.
Thompson, 50, was well liked internally at UnitedHealth, where he had risen in the ranks over 17 years before being named CEO of the insurance giant in 2021, according to his LinkedIn profile and company statements. He had previously run the Medicare business within UnitedHealthcare.
Legal scrutiny around UnitedHealthcare’s Medicare business regarding potentially overbilling the government affected Thompson personally during that time, said a former colleague, who spoke on the condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of Thompson’s death.
“He called me and said, ‘I’m from Iowa, my parents have difficulty explaining what I do, let alone being sued for a billion dollars,’” he said.
Colleagues described him as smart and affable, with an Iowa farm background that allowed him to explain complexities of health care in relatable terms. Known affectionately as “BT,” with the build of a former high school athlete, Thompson had the presence to give major speeches and lead corporate events — and a self-effacing manner that drew staff to him in more intimate settings, remembering personal details about hundreds of UnitedHealth employees, colleagues said. Thompson was known within the company for his focus on keeping premiums low, said one UnitedHealthcare staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job.
Thompson was on his way to present at UnitedHealth Group’s annual investor conference Wednesday when he was shot from behind by a masked gunman. Bullet casings recovered at the crime scene echoed words critics use to deride insurance company tactics — “delay, deny, defend” — according to a person with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing probe.
He told his wife, Paulette Thompson, 51, a physical therapist, that there were “some people that had been threatening him,” according to NBC News.
Thompson joined UnitedHealth Group in 2004 and over the next two decades rose quickly through the ranks of the company’s largest unit, UnitedHealthcare, which provides employer and individual health coverage to 50 million people in the United States. He enjoyed being part of a major company with lots of resources, believing that it enabled him to figure out big problems, said the former colleague.
That former colleague described Thompson as possessing strong business acumen and being likable, but also unafraid to be blunt and direct. As a public university graduate in an industry replete with Ivy League pedigrees, Thompson was fueled in part by wanting to prove himself, said the former colleague.
“I just saw a guy that wanted to be somebody and the reason he was going to be somebody was because of the chip that he had on his shoulder,” the former colleague said. “He had a much more modest background than probably a lot of the circles that he was running in. I don’t think it generated insecurity, but I think it motivated him.”
He was also a top executive of the parent company, though not its public face, typically playing a supporting role to CEO Andrew Witty in calls with financial analysts. Some colleagues saw him as a potential successor to the 60-year-old Witty, who has run UnitedHealth Group — the nation’s fourth-largest company — since February 2021.
Scrutiny on the company has mounted in recent years. Under Thompson, UnitedHealthcare ramped up its use of tactics such as “prior authorization,” in which physicians must submit additional paperwork to justify their treatments and prescriptions, according to reports by congressional investigators and federal watchdogs. The company also increasingly relied on automated programs to immediately reject claims, lawmakers and watchdogs have said.
Industry analysts have said that denying claims has helped UnitedHealthcare and other insurers cut costs and boost profits. The tactics have been faulted by lawmakers, federal officials and advocacy groups who say the health insurance giant has wrongly denied care to customers.
UnitedHealthcare has defended its practices, saying that lawmakers’ scrutiny is misplaced and that it is working to prioritize patient care.
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General investigated UnitedHealthcare and other health insurers that operated managed-care organizations, or MCOs. The probe focused on insurers’ Medicaid denials in 2019 — during part of which, Thompson ran UnitedHealthcare’s Medicaid business — and concluded that the program had high rates of prior authorization denials.
“These findings raise serious concerns that Medicaid MCOs are systematically and improperly denying necessary care which they are required by law to provide to the low-income children and families, seniors, and people with disabilities who rely on these plans for access to critical health care services,” congressional Democrats in September 2023 wrote to UnitedHealthcare.
Consumers’ frustrations with the company spilled out in protests long before Thompson’s killing.
When Witty, UnitedHealth Group’s CEO, testified in Congress in May, he was swarmed by protesters from People’s Action. The progressive advocacy group blamed the company for wrongly denying care.
“Stop using prior authorization to kill people,” Jennifer Coffey, a woman from Manchester, New Hampshire, said to Witty.
In a subsequent interview, Coffey and fellow protesters shared their stories of having their care requests rejected by UnitedHealthcare.
“Regulators shouldn’t have to be looking over insurers’ shoulders every time a senior citizen falls or suffers a stroke,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) said in a video accompanying a Senate report released in October that faulted UnitedHealthcare and other insurers for repeatedly turning down Medicare Advantage patients’ requests. Blumenthal oversaw the investigation.
When asked for comment, a spokesman for UnitedHealthcare pointed to a company statement. “While our hearts are broken, we have been touched by the huge outpouring of kindness and support in the hours since this horrific crime took place,” the statement said. “Our priorities are, first and foremost, supporting Brian’s family; ensuring the safety of our employees; and working with law enforcement to bring the perpetrator to justice.”
Earlier this year, a local firefighters’ pension fund and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, which calls itself the nation’s largest public pension fund, filed a lawsuit against UnitedHealth Group, Thompson and two other senior executives.
The suit alleged that they took part in deceitful business practices designed to artificially inflate UnitedHealth’s revenue and stock price, and then, in the case of Thompson and one other executive, sold their stock before news of a federal investigation into the company became public. The Wall Street Journal reported in February that the Justice Department had launched an antitrust probe into UnitedHealth Group.
Thompson, the suit said, sold more than 31 percent of his UnitedHealth stock for $15 million less than two weeks before the investigation became public.
The case is ongoing. The latest filing in the case came on Wednesday, the day Thompson was killed, according to court records. It was a judge’s order, stating that Thompson’s responses to the suit were due by March 1.
James Scullary, a spokesman for the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, said that the organization had not issued a statement related to the lawsuit or “any other pending matters.”
“We were shocked to hear of the events in New York and have shared our condolences with the company’s leadership,” he said.
Thompson grew up the son of a grain elevator worker and farmer in Jewell, Iowa — population 1,100 — and was the valedictorian of his high school, according to news reports. He graduated from the University of Iowa with a bachelor’s degree in business administration with an accounting major in May 1997, with special honors and highest distinction, meaning his GPA was 3.95 or above, the university said.
He lived in the upscale Whistling Pines neighborhood of Maple Grove, a small city outside of Minneapolis, according to public records. Thompson’s compensation package last year was valued at $10.2 million, the fourth highest among top executives at UnitedHealth Group, the insurer’s parent company.
“Brian was a wonderful person with a big heart and who lived life to the fullest,” his wife said in a statement to the Minnesota Star Tribune. “He will be greatly missed by everybody. Our hearts are broken, and we are completely devastated by this news. He touched so many lives.”
Thompson had been living separately from his wife and their two teenage sons in recent years, interviews with colleagues and neighbors showed.
Jim Pitzner, Thompson’s neighbor, said that Thompson had moved into a home on 62nd Avenue N. in Maple Grove a few years ago. Property records show Thompson purchased the five-bedroom, five-bath home for around $1 million in 2018. It’s now worth about $1.5 million.
Thompson’s sons visited occasionally, he said. Otherwise, Pitzner said, Thompson traveled often and was rarely home.
“He had a crazy travel schedule. The house is probably modest compared to what a CEO makes. It was just kind of a home base,” Pitzner said.
Daniel Gilbert, Aaron Schaffer and Caroline O’Donovan contributed to this report.
What Doctors Like Myself Know About Americans’ Health Care Anger
by Helenn Ouyng - NYT - December 8, 2024
Dr. Ouyang is an emergency physician and an associate professor at Columbia University.
I rushed around the patient as he lay motionless with his eyes closed in the emergency room. He was pale and sweaty, his T-shirt stained with vomit. You didn’t have to be a health-care worker to know that he was in a dire state. The beeps on the monitor told me his heart rate was dangerously slow. I told the man that he was going to be admitted to the hospital overnight.
After a pause, he beckoned me closer. His forehead furrowed with concern. I thought he would ask if he was going to be OK or if he needed surgery — questions I’m comfortable fielding. But instead he asked, “Will my insurance cover my stay?”
This is a question I can’t answer with certainty. Patients often believe that since I’m part of the health-care system, I would know. But I don’t, not as a doctor — and not even when I’m a patient myself. In the United States, health insurance is so extraordinarily complicated, with different insurers offering different plans, covering certain things and denying others (sometimes in spite of what they say initially they cover). I could never guarantee anything.
I didn’t say all this to the man, though, because I needed him to stay in the hospital and accept inpatient treatment. So instead I hedged. “You’re very sick,” I told him. “You shouldn’t worry about your insurance right now.” I should have been able to give him a better answer, under a better system.
The killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, the country’s largest health insurer, has reignited people’s contempt for their health plans. It’s unknown if Mr. Thompson’s tragic death was related to health care, and the gleeful responses have been horrifying. But that reaction, even in its objectionable vitriol, matters for how it lays bare Americans’ deep-seated anger toward health care. Around the country, anecdotes were unleashed with furor.
Among these grievances is the great unknown of whether a treatment recommended by a doctor will be covered. It’s critical for me as a physician to build trust with my patients by giving them clear answers. But the conversations we’re seeing now about health care remind me that insurance unknowns don’t just compromise the care I can deliver to my patients — they also undermine the fragile doctor-patient trust. It’s an unsustainable dynamic.
Unsurprisingly, despite my platitudes, my patient did worry. Instead of resting on the stretcher, he and his wife began calling his insurance company. To keep him from leaving, I tried to be more persuasive, even though I didn’t know what kind of health plan he had: “I’m sure your insurance will pay. I’ll document carefully how medically necessary this admission is.” I added that social workers and other advocates could also assist in sorting out his insurance once he was admitted. And, worst-case scenario, if they couldn’t, I crossed my fingers that the hospital’s charity care would help.
I said what I could to get him to stay, but I understood why he wanted to be certain. The average cost of a three-day hospital stay is $30,000. He had heard the health-insurance horror stories. Maybe he had lived through one himself.
One of my first lessons as a new attending physician in a hospital serving a working-class community was in insurance. I saw my colleagues prescribing suboptimal drugs and thought they weren’t practicing evidence-based medicine. In reality, they were doing something better — practicing patient-based medicine. When people said they couldn’t afford a medication that their insurance didn’t cover, they would prescribe an alternative, even if it wasn’t the best available option.
As a young doctor, I struggled with this. Studies show this drug is the most effective treatment, I would say. Of course, the insurer will cover it. My more seasoned colleague gently chided me that if I practiced this way, then my patients wouldn’t fill their prescriptions at all. And he was right.
I’ve been on the other side of the American health insurance quagmire too, as a patient. Recently, my primary care physician recommended that I have additional testing to assess my risk for certain diseases. The patient in me instinctively asked if my insurance covered it, even though I knew she wouldn’t know the answer. “They should,” she said. “It seems most insurers are paying for it.” I recognized her response — it’s the same optimistic but vague one I often give.
When doctors can’t give a straight or accurate answer, patients may lose faith in them. What’s more, when insurers reject claims, they usually blame the provider — the medical code used was wrong, the diagnosis wasn’t specific enough — which can further erode the relationship between patients and their doctors.
I saw this happen with my mother. She got her annual flu shot, which is part of her preventive care — a proactive step we want patients to take — but her insurance said it wasn’t covered because her doctor supposedly used the wrong code. The clinic resubmitted the claim, but it continued to be denied. Each time my mother called her insurance company, an agent blamed her doctor. Eventually, my mother grudgingly returned to her physician for her annual exam, but her relationship with the primary care practice has frayed. She also no longer gets her vaccines there.
My one family member with solid insurance is my dog. He got elective surgery recently, and I was astounded by the straightforward nature of his insurance. Once we meet the deductible, everything is simply covered by 80 percent. This is clearly described in a packet I received when I first signed him up. It’s an imperfect comparison to insurance for humans — I pay in full first, then get reimbursed — but it’s incredible to think that insurance for pets and possessions is easier to navigate and more consumer-friendly than insurance for people.
The country is not heading toward a single-payer system, but that doesn’t mean we have to continue leaving patients and their doctors in the dark. I loathe the fact that patients can’t automatically get the care they need without thinking about costs. But they at least deserve clarity about what’s covered before they acquiesce to expensive tests and treatments. Health insurance shouldn’t be so opaque, up to the whim of different companies. Coverage shouldn’t be so convoluted, mired in rigid codes and obfuscating wording. I should be able to tell my patient in the E.R. if his hospital stay will definitely be paid for. I know exactly how much of my dog’s care will be covered; why can’t I know the same for my patients?
In the end, my patient in the E.R. decided to go home that day. I reiterated how sick he was. I showed him the results that concerned me, even tried to tell him that he could possibly die if he left the hospital. But I’m not sure how much he trusted me after my overconfident assurances that his insurance would pay; when he finally got through to an agent, he was told coverage would depend on the specifics of his care.
He couldn’t risk a big hospital bill right now, he told me, matter-of-factly. He promised to come back if he felt worse.
Helen Ouyang (@drhelenouyang) is a physician, an associate professor at Columbia University and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. She is also a fellow at the Type Media Center.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/08/opinion/health-care-anger.html
Suspect in C.E.O. Killing Withdrew From a Life of Privilege and Promise
The suspect, Luigi Mangione, was an Ivy League tech graduate from a prominent Maryland family who in recent months had suffered physical and psychological pain.
Luigi Mangione, the online version of him, was an Ivy League tech enthusiast who flaunted his tanned, chiseled looks in beach photos and party pictures with blue-blazered frat buddies.
He was the valedictorian of a prestigious Baltimore prep school who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a head counselor at a pre-college program at Stanford University.
With his credentials and connections, he could have ended up one day as an entrepreneur or the chief executive of one of his family’s thriving businesses. Instead, investigators suspect, he took a different path.
The police now believe that Mr. Mangione, 26, is the masked gunman who calmly took out a pistol equipped with a suppressor on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and assassinated Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. He was arrested in Altoona, Pa., on Monday after an employee at a McDonald’s recognized him and called the police. Officers said they found him with fake identification, a weapon similar to the one seen in video of the killing and a manifesto decrying the health care industry.
Later on Monday, Mr. Mangione was charged in Manhattan with murder, along with additional counts of forgery and illegal weapons possession. And in the hours after his apprehension, his baffling journey from star student to murder suspect began to come into focus.
Mr. Mangione was in regular contact with friends and family until about six months ago when he suddenly and inexplicably stopped communicating with them. He had been suffering from a painful back injury, friends said, and then went dark, prompting anxious inquiries from relatives to his friends: Had anyone heard from him?
In July, one man tagged a social media account that appeared to belong to Mr. Mangione and said that he hadn’t heard from him in months. “You made commitments to me for my wedding and if you can’t honor them I need to know so I can plan accordingly,” the man wrote in a now-deleted post.
Those six months will most likely become a focus for investigators as they try to gather more evidence about Mr. Mangione’s connection to the killing, and what he was doing in the time that no one could find him.
Mr. Mangione left behind a long series of postings about self-improvement, healthy eating and technology — and a review of the Unabomber’s manifesto. Bullet casings left at the scene, scrawled with words like “deny” and “delay,” left the authorities and the public wondering if the shooting was payback for health care insurers rejecting claims.
In the wake of the attack, social media seethed with resentment against the insurance industry, and the unidentified suspect became, to some, a folk hero.
Mr. Mangione came from a privileged upbringing, part of an influential real estate family in the Baltimore area.
His grandfather, Nick Mangione Sr., and grandmother, Mary C. Mangione, purchased the Turf Valley country club in Ellicott City, Md., in the 1970s and developed the golf course community.
In the 1980s, the family purchased Hayfields Country Club in Hunt Valley, Md. It also founded the nursing home company Lorien Health Services, and Mr. Mangione’s father, Louis Mangione, became an owner. The family also owned the radio station WCBM, which airs politically conservative programs and has other real estate holdings. A cousin, Nino Mangione, is an elected member of the Maryland House of Delegates.
The family’s wealth and work with charity made it well known in Baltimore. Luigi Mangione was “just the last person you would suspect,” said Thomas J. Maronick Jr., a lawyer and radio host who knows several members of the Mangione family.
“It is just such a well-respected family and such a prominent family within Baltimore County,” he said.
Luigi Mangione attended high school at the prestigious Gilman School in Baltimore, where he wrestled and played other sports and was the valedictorian of his graduating class in 2016. In a graduation speech, he described his class as “coming up with new ideas and challenging the world around it.”
He thanked parents in attendance for sending him and his classmates to the school, which he described as “far from a small financial investment.” Tuition is currently $37,690 per year for high schoolers.
Aaron Cranston, who became friends with Mr. Mangione during their time at Gilman, said he recalled Mr. Mangione as being particularly smart — perhaps the smartest at the elite private school. Even before college, Mr. Mangione had already made a mobile app where users could fly a paper airplane through obstacles.
Mr. Mangione was social, friendly and never particularly political, Mr. Cranston recalled. He was ambitious and carried his long interest in computer science toward college.
“He was a big believer in the power of technology to change the world,” Mr. Cranston said.
Freddie Leatherbury, 26, an accountant who lives in Catonsville, Md., graduated from Gilman with Mr. Mangione in 2016. He recalled Mr. Mangione playing soccer for the high school team and running track or cross country.
“Those are both such disciplined sports. It says a lot about who he was as a student,” Mr. Leatherbury said. “He was very smart, a pretty big math guy, really well read and quite well liked to be honest. I don’t have any bad memories of him. He had a very healthy social circle.”
Race Saunders, 27, now a software developer who lives in California, recalled being “study buddies” with Mr. Mangione in high school. He remembered Mr. Mangione as a hard worker.
“We were all definitely leaning toward computer science,” Mr. Saunders said.
In college, Mr. Mangione excelled in that field. The commencement program for the University of Pennsylvania’s class of 2020 lists Mr. Mangione as a member of the school’s chapter of Eta Kappa Nu, an academic honor society for students in electrical and computer engineering that was founded in 1904. The society is selective, inviting only the top quarter of the junior class and top third of the senior class in those majors for membership, according to its website.
Mr. Mangione’s interest in computer games started at a young age, when he began exploring the community online, according to a now-deleted interview published on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus events blog in 2018. From there, the interview said, he wanted to start creating games himself and taught himself to code in high school.
“That’s why I’m a computer science major now, that’s how I got into it,” Mr. Mangione said in the interview. “I just really wanted to make games.”
After college, Mr. Mangione worked for or had internships with several tech companies, according to his LinkedIn profile and a former employer.
Mr. Mangione’s profile said that he had worked as a software engineer at TrueCar, an online marketplace based in Santa Monica, Calif. The company said in a statement that he had not been an employee since 2023.
In recent years, Mr. Mangione lived for six months in Honolulu in a “co-living” space called Surfbreak that caters to remote workers.
R.J. Martin, the founder of Surfbreak, said that when he met Mr. Mangione in 2022, he was interviewing to be among the initial 20 or so occupants paying about $2,000 per month to share quarters.
Mr. Martin described Mr. Mangione as a smart, accomplished and upbeat engineer. “Our mission statement is that we’re a community of givers and that we leave things better than we found them,” Mr. Martin said. “We look for people who are looking to give back. And he fit the bill. He was an ideal member for us.”
But Mr. Mangione was suffering from painful back issues, he said. “His spine was kind of misaligned,” he said. “He said his lower vertebrae were almost like a half-inch off, and I think it pinched a nerve.”
Mr. Mangione did not make a habit of complaining, and did not seem to be on any type of painkilling medication, Mr. Martin said.
Still, Mr. Martin said, he and others in the community came to understand that the pain was no small matter to a young man yearning for a normal lifestyle. “He knew that dating and being physically intimate with his back condition wasn’t possible,” Mr. Martin said. “I remember him telling me that, and my heart just breaks.”
Mr. Mangione left the co-living space after six months to return to the East Coast, where he told Mr. Martin he was planning to see his doctor. He returned to Honolulu afterward and rented an apartment in the same neighborhood.
Mr. Martin said that Mr. Mangione left Hawaii in the summer of 2023, presumably for an operation on his back. In August of that year, Mr. Martin said, he checked in via text to see how his friend was doing, “and he sent me back pictures of his back surgery.”
The pictures — scans of Mr. Mangione’s spine — were so jarring that Mr. Martin texted back asking how Mr. Mangione was feeling. “So, long story,” Mr. Mangione replied, according to Mr. Martin. “Will fill ya in in person. Back in Hawaii as soon as I can, I have to figure out some spine stuff here first.”
He said Mr. Mangione did, in fact, report in late 2023 that he had gone back to Hawaii, visiting Maui, the Big Island and Oahu in November and December before returning to Baltimore to see his family. While in Oahu, Mr. Mangione received a citation for trespassing for having failed to observe a sign at the Nu’uanu Pali Lookout, a spot with a breathtaking view of the island. He was fined $100.
Mr. Martin said he made plans to connect with Mr. Mangione in February. When March came and went, Mr. Martin texted: “Miss you brother. Hope you are mostly recovered. Let’s catch up soon.”
“Yea dude let’s catch up on the phone,” Mr. Mangione replied on April 15, according to Mr. Martin.
But they did not connect. On May 20, Mr. Martin thought of his friend again and texted: “Yo! You awake?” Mr. Mangione did not answer, he said. A month later, on June 23, he texted him again. “Where in the world are you?”
There was no response.
Through a series of posts, Mr. Mangione’s trail on the internet hinted at pain both physical and philosophical.
In January, Mr. Mangione left a review of a book containing the rambling manifesto of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, on GoodReads, a social media site for bookworms.
“It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies,” Mr. Mangione wrote of the document. “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.”
One of Mr. Mangione’s favorite quotes, listed on GoodReads, was, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” from Jiddu Krishnamurti, the religious philosopher and teacher.
The GoodReads page also included self-help books about health and the human body, including, “Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery.”
A social media account that appeared to belong to Mr. Mangione featured an X-ray image of a spine reinforced with surgical implants. The X-ray showed a spinal fusion, a procedure that uses screws and rods to fuse two levels of the spine to address a misalignment that can cause serious pain, according to Dr. Hasit Mehta, a professor at New York Medical College.
Mr. Cranston, the school friend, said that he was forwarded a message this year from Mr. Mangione’s family saying that the family had not heard from him in several months after his surgery. Relatives were hoping friends might know of his whereabouts.
Few, if any, did until his arrest on Monday morning.
Mr. Saunders, the high school friend, was shocked by the news but was skeptical that his classmate had suffered a psychological break.
“I would be surprised if it was some kind of mental breakdown,” he said.
For now, investigators will be looking for any additional clues that might link Mr. Mangione to the shooting. One thing they were examining was the handwritten manifesto that he had in his possession when he was arrested, according to a senior law enforcement official.
The 262-word handwritten document begins with the writer appearing to take responsibility for the murder, according to a senior law enforcement official who saw the document. It notes that as UnitedHealthcare’s market capitalization has grown, American life expectancy has not.
“To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone,” the writer wrote. The note condemns companies that “continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.”
At Mr. Mangione’s arraignment in Pennsylvania on Monday, a judge asked him whether he was in contact with his family.
“Until recently,” he replied.
Reporting was contributed by Mike Isaac, Emma Goldberg, Maria Cramer, Jesus Jiménez, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Campbell Robertson, Callie Holtermann, Chelsia Rose Marcius, William K. Rashbaum, JoAnna Daemmrich, Jack Truesdale, Ryan Mac, Andy Newman, Brian Conway, Jan Ransom, Jacey Fortin, Shayla Colon, Heather Knight and Ashley Southall. Research was contributed by Susan C. Beachy, Kirsten Noyes and Kitty Bennett.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/nyregion/united-healthcare-ceo-shooting-luigi-mangione.html
Distrustful of Health Agencies, These Voters Cheer Trump’s Picks to Run Them
As a nature-loving physical therapist in Boulder, Colo., Colin O’Banion shops at farmers markets, grows organic squash in his backyard and thought he could never vote for Donald J. Trump.
But during the pandemic, he said, he and his wife became social outcasts when they refused Covid-19 vaccines for themselves and their three sons. Tuning in to alternative health podcasts, he became convinced that the country’s public health establishment was corrupt, and that the only antidote was the upheaval being promised by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as he teamed up with Mr. Trump.
“That’s what brought me on board,” Mr. O’Banion, 49, said, still sounding surprised that he had voted for Mr. Trump, now the president-elect. “We have a real epidemic going on with metabolic disease, diabetes, obesity. How is it possible we have so much money and the most unhealthy people?”
Scientists and public health experts have expressed alarm that Mr. Trump wants to give over the country’s health agencies to people like Mr. Kennedy and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who have spread misinformation about vaccines and Covid treatments and vowed to gut the government agencies that regulate food and medicines.
But to people like Mr. O’Banion, rejecting norms is exactly the point.
Trust in scientists and medical experts has eroded since the pandemic, and voters galvanized by Mr. Kennedy’s pledge to “Make America Healthy Again” as head of the Department of Health and Human Services said that he had given voice to their frustrations with the whole system — from vaccines and Covid rules to hospitals and health insurance.
“I see that man as someone who understands what’s happening and who is trying to help,” said Savannah Fisher, 36, a resident of St. Augustine, Fla., who said she turned to alternative treatments for chronic pain after feeling dismissed by medical doctors.
Years before the pandemic battles over vaccine mandates, school closures and mask rules turned public health into a partisan minefield, Americans struggled with worsening health outcomes, even as many were plagued by medical debt.
“You have a large swath of the population facing a health crisis, and they feel like medicine and public health isn’t delivering,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, who served as President Biden’s Covid response coordinator. “They’re much more open to people saying, ‘The whole system is corrupt and we have to blow the whole thing up.’”
According to public surveys by the Pew Research Center, nearly eight in 10 Americans still say they believe that scientists act in the public interest — a far higher level of trust than people give to politicians or the news media. Yet many Americans no longer have lasting relationships with primary care doctors, and social media influencers, often with little or no medical training, have rushed to fill the void.
A CBS poll found some early support for Mr. Kennedy’s nomination to run the federal health department, with 47 percent of voters saying he was a good pick and 34 percent opposing him. (Both he and Dr. Oz, whom Mr. Trump nominated to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, are subject to Senate confirmation.)
Many of Mr. Kennedy’s fans make for unlikely allies: small-government conservatives who opposed Covid lockdowns, for example, and liberals sympathetic to Mr. Kennedy’s attacks on drug makers and factory farms.
Even Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, praised Mr. Kennedy’s nomination, though he quickly clarified his position to say he disagreed with Mr. Kennedy’s opinions about vaccines after a backlash from public health experts in his state.
In nearly two dozen interviews, voters supportive of Mr. Trump’s “MAHA” agenda — including many who have voted Democratic in the past — said they liked Mr. Kennedy because he shared their grievances about health care and shared their interest in alternative medicines and natural remedies.
In Austin, Texas, Michelle High, 54, said she began questioning the medical establishment after an oncologist told her there was nothing she could do to improve her odds of surviving colon cancer.
Ms. High began seeing a naturopath and made nutritional changes to supplement her treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. After reading more about holistic health, she came to believe that the medical establishment was ignoring what seemed to her an obvious connection between the American food system and chronic disease. Although government agencies have studied and sought to raise awareness about that link, many critics like Ms. High say it’s not nearly enough.
“Our government is just like, ‘Nope,’” she said. “That feels dirty, and that’s where you get all the conspiracy theories — when you feel like they’re lying to you, and gaslighting you, telling you: ‘There’s nothing. Don’t look there.’”
Ms. High said she trusts her doctors, but she has stopped discussing her alternative treatments with them.
“They just make you feel small,” she said.
In the Atlanta suburbs, Melinda Hicks, 55, is a lifelong Democrat who voted for Mr. Trump in November thanks to Mr. Kennedy’s endorsement of him. Watching her father undergo painful and ultimately ineffective treatments for colon cancer soured her on Western medicine, she said, and she turned to naturopathic doctors and acupuncturists to address her family’s health issues.
She had long wanted Democrats to offer a different approach on health policy but kept voting for them because she saw them as her party. Until last month. While Kamala Harris championed abortion rights, birth control and the Affordable Care Act, Ms. Hicks felt that the vice president and other Democrats should have focused more on the country’s broader health problems.
“How do you look around at how sick people are and not say, well, I may not agree with Bobby Kennedy, but he’s right, we’ve got a real problem here?” she asked.
Ms. Hicks said her family spends thousands of dollars a year on alternative treatments that are not covered by their insurance, which they rarely use. She hopes that Mr. Kennedy might be able to expand the types of services covered; insurance companies typically limit coverage to treatments that have been proven effective for a certain condition.
What’s unclear is whether Mr. Kennedy, a former Democrat and environmental lawyer, will make good on his vows to go after heavily processed foods, seed oils, food dyes, corporate farmers and drug makers as part of a second Trump administration that is also promising to cut regulations. In his first term, Mr. Trump loosened nutrition rules for school lunches and approved scores of products containing pesticides.
Public health officials are already warning that Mr. Trump’s agenda could endanger Americans if scientists are purged from federal agencies and health decisions are made by political appointees who reject expert advice.
And some researchers say that Mr. Kennedy’s emphasis on toxins and the food supply overlooks Americans’ top concern about health care: its cost.
“Obesity, better food, those things don’t come up” in polling about health care issues, said Mollyann Brodie, executive director of KFF’s Public Opinion and Survey Research Program.
Mr. Kennedy’s advocacy for healthy eating and exercise is hardly unique — health experts and bipartisan administrations have championed them for decades. But some people are skeptical of his proposals, such as giving Americans three organic meals a day in place of weight-loss drugs.
“He’s got some valid points,” said Julie Conklin, 67, of Healdsburg, Calif. “But then he bases things so much on what I would view as junk science.”
Some Democratic voters said that they worried more about Republicans in Congress repealing the Affordable Care Act than Mr. Kennedy’s promotion of raw milk or opposition to water fluoridation.
Myron Randles, 62, a supervisor at a building materials company in Riverside, Calif., said he believes there are two tiers in the American health care system: One for the “ultra wealthy” and the other for the “regular, everyday people.” He said he did not trust Mr. Trump, noting his suggestion early in the pandemic that injecting a disinfectant might cure Covid-19, or Dr. Oz, whom Mr. Randles dismissed as a TV huckster, to make health policy decisions.
“I am sorry, I don’t have faith,” he said. “I need a doctor that will actually prescribe things that will help.”
But in New Jersey, Cindy James, 59, who left a job as a corporate lawyer to become a spiritual counselor, said Mr. Kennedy’s rise showed that Americans had hit a “cumulative breaking point” when it came to accepting public health guidelines.
She said she had felt shamed by friends, politicians and the news media for refusing to get a Covid vaccination. With Mr. Trump returning to the White House, she said, she felt vindicated.
“People across the country are waking up from being told how to think and what to do,” she said, “especially about what we put in our bodies, what we breathe, and what’s in our water.”
Vik Jolly, Simon J. Levien and Abigail Geiger contributed reporting.
Jack Healy is a Phoenix-based national correspondent who focuses on the fast-changing politics and climate of the Southwest. He has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan and is a graduate of the University of Missouri’s journalism school.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/02/us/trump-public-health-dr-oz-rfk-jr.html
Long a ‘Crown Jewel’ of Government, N.I.H. Is Now a Target
The agency long benefited from broad bipartisan support. But Republican criticism has intensified, and new choices for top health posts hope to upend the organization.
Teddy Rosenbluth and Emily Anthes - NYT - December 1, 2024
The National Institutes of Health, the world’s leading public funder of biomedical research, has an enviable track record. Research supported by the agency has led to more than 100 Nobel Prizes and has supported more than 99 percent of the drugs approved by federal regulators from 2010 to 2019.
No surprise, then, that the agency has been called “the crown jewel of the federal government.” But come January, when President-elect Donald J. Trump and congressional Republicans take charge, the N.I.H. may face a reckoning.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the new administration’s selection for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the N.I.H., routinely castigates federal scientists and is a staunch critic of conventional pharmaceuticals and vaccines, with a long record of spreading falsehoods about vaccine safety.
He has said that he would steer the agency into a yearslong “break” from infectious disease research, focusing instead on chronic diseases.
And Mr. Trump’s pick for N.I.H. director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford professor who gained notoriety during the pandemic for supporting the widely maligned idea that the coronavirus should be left to spread freely among healthy Americans, has called for a dramatic restructuring of the N.I.H., which he has said is led by small-minded bureaucrats.
While even the agency’s defenders acknowledge that the N.I.H. needs modernization, the radical reforms now proposed would be difficult, if not impossible, without years of legal wrangling and significant support from Congress, experts say.
But many fear that the next administration will nonetheless weaken the N.I.H., divesting from critical research with long-lasting consequences for science, innovation and public health.
A spokesman for the Trump transition team said Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks will “slash wasteful spending in our broken health care system that cripples our nation’s budget” and “return health care to the Gold Standard.”
Dr. Bhattacharya and Mr. Kennedy did not respond to requests for comment.
The N.I.H. comprises 27 institutes, each focused on a different set of diseases or health topics, such as cancer, aging or substance abuse. The agency has roughly 6,000 of its own scientists, but more than 80 percent of its $47 billion budget goes to outside researchers, who apply for grant money in a highly competitive process.
Politicians have periodically succeeded in curtailing certain types of studies they didn’t like. Republican administrations have sharply restricted embryonic stem cell and fetal tissue research, moves that were reversed by their Democratic successors.
But historically, the agency was broadly popular on both sides of the political aisle. During his first term, Mr. Trump proposed slashing the N.I.H.’s annual budget by about 18 percent; Congress approved funding increases instead.
“The N.I.H. seemed to have escaped political gravity — they’ve been beloved by both political parties, almost uniquely,” said Lawrence Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown Law. “This is a huge tipping point.”
The Covid-19 pandemic was the catalyst. Republicans criticized agency leaders for dismissing the theory that the coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, and for financially supporting research conducted there.
Vaccine skeptics noted that Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine was developed with substantial support from the N.I.H. And Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, became the face of unpopular pandemic policies, including lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
Northern Light prepares for complex health care future
by William Tracy - Portland Press Herald - December 5, 2024
ELLSWORTH — Northern Light Health leadership detailed upcoming developments for the future of health care in Maine and their unfolding efforts to continue serving the community during a community webinar last month.
“We recognize that the future of healthcare is not just about innovation and technology; it’s also about our relationships with people like you,” said Tim Dentry, president and CEO of Northern Light Health, during the presentation. “Together, we can create a health delivery system that is not only responsive but also resilient. We are confident our actions will allow Northern Light Health to continue to serve Mainers for generations to come.”
The hospital system has struggled financially in recent years. The Bangor Daily News reported in October that Northern Light was poised to lose more than $100 million this year and that the organization was $620 million in debt.
During the webinar, leadership gave an overview of health care in Maine and the unique post-pandemic challenges of care delivery in the largely rural state. The seminar highlighted Northern Light’s efforts toward forming partnerships, streamlining administrative costs, recruiting workers and delivering the right care to the right place.
The last subject is an increasing source of concern for health care officials throughout the state. With the oldest population nationwide, Maine has a large and growing demographic of 65 and older residents. This, paired with the fact other age demographics are stagnant or decreasing, indicates higher levels of stress on a health care system already spread thin. Still reeling from the pandemic, health care facilities continue to close down or reduce services in mainly rural areas with officials citing rising costs, labor shortages and low reimbursement rates.
Hancock County is no exception. Here Northern Light officials are working to restructure services for the turbulent future.
“We are committed to serving the healthcare needs of Hancock County,” said Chris Facchini, Northern Light spokesperson. “There is no question that the challenges facing healthcare will require some difficult decisions. Our investment in a brand new state-of-the art hospital in Blue Hill and the investment at our Maine Coast Hospital in our new obstetrics unit, upgraded cardiology department, upgraded inpatient rooms and new technology in computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging are a few recent examples of our commitment to this community.”
Facchini detailed how local Northern Light facilities will restructure. He started with streamlining administrative costs, weeding out and merging extraneous positions to expand efficiency and cut costs.
“We are streamlining costs so we can focus on investing in access to care and maintaining contemporary medical technologies,” he said.
Facchini said Northern Light has partnered with various health care organizations, such as Compass One Healthcare, a business-to-business service providing support for many health care functions, to strengthen area health providers and facilities with a consolidated platform for recruitment and resources.
“These partnerships allow us to leverage the economies of scale for purchasing power, specialized expertise and enhanced recruiting capabilities,” he said.
To combat staffing shortages, Facchini said Northern Light has partnered with state educational institutions to source nursing and other clinical professionals.
“We have strong education partnerships across the state,” he said. “We are having success in recruiting nurses from abroad that we welcome into our Maine communities to grow the nursing workforce.”
Facchini said Hancock County’s abundance of island communities and rural layout presents unique challenges. He points to the coordination between Northern Light regional hospitals as an example of their renewed emphasis on efficiency.
“Lack of transportation options creates access challenges and affects our ability to deliver sustainable care,” he said. “The new hospital campus in Blue Hill is focused on outpatient care with a small number of inpatient acute care beds. Surgery, procedures, and more acute levels of care are provided in Ellsworth at Northern Light Maine Coast Hospital, and when necessary, in Bangor. We also share leadership team members between these two Hancock County hospitals.”
Lastly, Facchini highlighted plans to address hurdles in revenue and reimbursement, mainly facilitating the payment process from insurance companies.
“Northern Light Health must get paid by the insurance companies for the services we provide, and insurers are making these processes increasingly difficult for our patients, our hospitals and physicians,” he said. “We are insisting on getting paid timely and for the amounts represented in our contracts.”
With the new year ahead, Facchini said he is optimistic about the future of Maine health care, despite the looming concerns.
“We have a long-standing history, and our plans are focused on sustaining our services for the long term to deliver on our promise to make healthcare work for our Maine communities,” he said. “We will continue to sustain the long-term exceptional care and access points that our communities expect and depend on.”
Anyone interested in watching the seminar can go to northernlighthealth.org/communitytownhall.
No comments:
Post a Comment