Maybe a Revolution?
The Revolution is coming. Maybe. I can’t be sure. I’m not a seer so any prognostication I make does not carry a money back guarantee. Plus, I don’t want to scare anyone.
I’m basing my oh-so-tentative belief on the recent New York assassination of Brian Thompson, the 50-year-old CEO of UnitedHealthcare. I don’t condone murder. And I didn’t know who Mr. Thompson was until he was shot and killed last week in front of his hotel. As I write this, a suspect has been arrested with documentation criticizing the health care system. The suspect, a 26-year-old man with what may have been a ghost gun created using a 3D printer, is now in custody.
Political assassinations are rarely of non-government personnel. In the United States, we have a history of gun violence against elected leaders, and more than 60 have been killed by gunshot. Charles C.P. Arndt, a Whig who served on the Council of the Wisconsin Territory, was the first victim, killed by a Fellow Councilor. One politician killed another.
What we have in the murder of Mr. Thompson is an unfathomably rich CEO (he earned approximately $10 million a year and was worth some $43 million) stalked by privileged young man from a well-known Baltimore family. The man, an Ivy League graduate, was in pain from a back injury made worse by a surfing accident. He was in pain and dissatisfied with the health insurance tactics of Deny, Defend, Delay, a common industry practice. Simply put, he wanted UnitedHealth to be made an example of big business insensitivity.
A recent New Yorker article revealed UnitedHealthcare has the highest claim-denial rate of any private insurance company: at thirty-two per cent, it is double the industry. To decide who will be given care, the company employs an algorithm that in a class-action lawsuit, was shown to have “a known error rate” of ninety percent.
“At the same time,” says the New Yorker, “that news was breaking about the algorithm, the company was fighting—ultimately unsuccessfully—a court decision that it had acted ‘arbitrarily and capriciously’ in repeatedly denying coverage of long-term residential treatment to a middle-school-age girl who repeatedly attempted suicide, and has since died by suicide.
“Several years ago, government investigators found that UnitedHealth had used algorithms to identify mental-health-care providers who they believed were treating patients too often; these identified therapists would typically receive a call from a company ‘care advocate’ who would question them and then cut off reimbursements.
“Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, another billion-dollar provider, recently announced that in certain states, it would no longer pay for anesthesia if a surgery passed a pre-allotted time limit. The cost of the ‘extra’ anesthesia would be passed from Anthem to the patient.”
Revolutions ignite when the destitute or the intellectuals (or more often, both, in an uneasy alliance) decide enough is enough. The suspect in Mr. Thompson’s alleged murderer had read the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Kaczynski, a self-styled intellectual with a plethora of complaints about, well, almost everything including the injustices of healthcare. The thoughts of the two revolutionaries—for that is what they were—meshed, though they never met…
I’m not drawing conclusions here. Both Thompson and his aggressor have been described as nice guys, though the word ‘nice’ applied to a CEO millionaire is likely to have a different meaning when referring to an average citizen. No one considered them violent or capable of killing but it could be argued the CEO’s company might well be responsible for thousands of deaths resulting from denial, defend, delay. Not assassinations, surely, but deaths nevertheless.
I’m basing my oh-so-tentative belief on the recent New York assassination of Brian Thompson, the 50-year-old CEO of UnitedHealthcare. I don’t condone murder. And I didn’t know who Mr. Thompson was until he was shot and killed last week in front of his hotel. As I write this, a suspect has been arrested with documentation criticizing the health care system. The suspect, a 26-year-old man with what may have been a ghost gun created using a 3D printer, is now in custody.
Political assassinations are rarely of non-government personnel. In the United States, we have a history of gun violence against elected leaders, and more than 60 have been killed by gunshot. Charles C.P. Arndt, a Whig who served on the Council of the Wisconsin Territory, was the first victim, killed by a Fellow Councilor. One politician killed another.
What we have in the murder of Mr. Thompson is an unfathomably rich CEO (he earned approximately $10 million a year and was worth some $43 million) stalked by privileged young man from a well-known Baltimore family. The man, an Ivy League graduate, was in pain from a back injury made worse by a surfing accident. He was in pain and dissatisfied with the health insurance tactics of Deny, Defend, Delay, a common industry practice. Simply put, he wanted UnitedHealth to be made an example of big business insensitivity.
A recent New Yorker article revealed UnitedHealthcare has the highest claim-denial rate of any private insurance company: at thirty-two per cent, it is double the industry. To decide who will be given care, the company employs an algorithm that in a class-action lawsuit, was shown to have “a known error rate” of ninety percent.
“At the same time,” says the New Yorker, “that news was breaking about the algorithm, the company was fighting—ultimately unsuccessfully—a court decision that it had acted ‘arbitrarily and capriciously’ in repeatedly denying coverage of long-term residential treatment to a middle-school-age girl who repeatedly attempted suicide, and has since died by suicide.
“Several years ago, government investigators found that UnitedHealth had used algorithms to identify mental-health-care providers who they believed were treating patients too often; these identified therapists would typically receive a call from a company ‘care advocate’ who would question them and then cut off reimbursements.
“Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, another billion-dollar provider, recently announced that in certain states, it would no longer pay for anesthesia if a surgery passed a pre-allotted time limit. The cost of the ‘extra’ anesthesia would be passed from Anthem to the patient.”
Revolutions ignite when the destitute or the intellectuals (or more often, both, in an uneasy alliance) decide enough is enough. The suspect in Mr. Thompson’s alleged murderer had read the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Kaczynski, a self-styled intellectual with a plethora of complaints about, well, almost everything including the injustices of healthcare. The thoughts of the two revolutionaries—for that is what they were—meshed, though they never met…
I’m not drawing conclusions here. Both Thompson and his aggressor have been described as nice guys, though the word ‘nice’ applied to a CEO millionaire is likely to have a different meaning when referring to an average citizen. No one considered them violent or capable of killing but it could be argued the CEO’s company might well be responsible for thousands of deaths resulting from denial, defend, delay. Not assassinations, surely, but deaths nevertheless.
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