A day after a gunman murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside the Hilton Midtown hotel in New York, the first clues about the motivation of the gunman, who remains at large in New York City, point to resentment against the managed healthcare. a factor in the murder.
On Wednesday, December 4, around 6:45 a.m., Thompson, 50, was walking toward the entrance of the New York Hilton Midtown, preparing to address UnitedHealthcare’s annual investor day meeting, when a man approached. man wearing a balaclava. behind him and shot him with a silenced pistol, and then fled on a bicycle, apparently heading to nearby Central Park. The NYPD continues to engage in an intense manhunt and is searching for clues.
On Thursday afternoon, CNN’s Amanda Musa and Jason Hanna wrote that “city police are tasked with tracking the shooter’s steps, reviewing a mountain of surveillance video and examining evidence he may have left throughout the city and at the scene of the shooting in midtown Manhattan.” What’s more, Musa and Hanna wrote: “Police say they have surveillance video of the shooting, although it shows the masked gunman. The video helped investigators determine the suspect’s first movements after the shooting, police said. Police have also released photos of a “person of interest wanted for questioning” wearing a hooded jacket and no mask. CNN has geolocated the two images to the location of a shelter located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where investigators have said they believe a suspect may have stayed, and which investigators have searched. Police have also released photos showing someone they say is the suspect at a nearby Starbucks, taken less than 30 minutes before the incident.” Police also believe the suspect stayed at a hostel in Manhattan, sharing a multi-person room with two other men.” They have also found a phone and a bottle of water near the scene of the shooting that the gunman may have dropped.
Resentment over managed care?
Meanwhile, one important clue could be resentment toward the managed care industry. As he New York TimesDionne Searcey and Madison Malone Kircher wrote Thursday afternoon“The messages that law enforcement officials say were found on bullet casings at the scene of the shooting outside a Midtown hotel — ‘delay’ and ‘deny’ — are two words familiar to many Americans who have Interacted with insurance companies for almost anything. apart from routine medical visits.”
What’s more, Searcey and Kircher wrote: “Wednesday’s shooting death of a top UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, on a Manhattan sidewalk has unleashed an outpouring of morbid glee from patients and others who say they have had experiences negative feelings with health insurance companies during some of the most difficult times in their lives. “Thoughts and thoughts for the family,” reads a comment under a video of the shooting posted online by CNN. ‘Unfortunately, my condolences are off the grid.’” And they reported that a TikTok user wrote: “I’m an ER nurse and the things I’ve seen insurance deny to dying patients make me physically sick. “I just can’t feel sympathy for him for all those patients and their families.”
And they quoted Stephan Meier, president of the management division at Columbia Business School, who they said told them that “[T]The attack could send shock waves through the broader health insurance industry.” “The insurance industry is not the most beloved, to put it mildly,” Meier told them. “If I were a C-suite executive at another insurance company, I’d be thinking, ‘What does this mean for me?’ Am I next?
Searcey and Kircher noted that UnitedHealthcare executives had been aware of the health plan’s member dissatisfaction for years and that, in fact, “Mr. Thompson was one of the few executives who wanted to do something about it,” according to an employee who spoke on condition of anonymity. And they quoted Eric Sean Clay, president of the International Association for Healthcare Security, which provides security to some of the largest healthcare companies in North America, as saying that “CEOs are often the most vulnerable face.” visible of an organization. “Sometimes people hate that person and want to hurt them.”
Is additional security needed?
Meanwhile, Shelby Livingston, senior health technology reporter at Terminal news, wrote on Thursday afternoon that “The cold-blooded shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Wednesday shocked corporate America, highlighting the threats increasingly faced by healthcare executives and workers, and prompting companies to rethink the measures they take to keep their senior leaders safe. Due to their high profile, company CEOs often have protective details. And there have been previous cases of top executives facing harassment and threats. But this week’s murder was a shocking outlier, and actual violence against senior executives is almost unheard of,” he wrote, citing Dr. J. Mario Molina, USofCare board chairman and former president and CEO from Molina Healthcare, saying that “I have never seen this before,” and that he himself had never received threats or traveled in personal safety. “However, if he were CEO of Molina today, he said, he would start thinking about how to protect everyone at the health plan, not just the top executives,” Livingston wrote.
And Livingston wrote: “As for UnitedHealth, the only mention of security efforts for executives in its proxy statement is that the parent company [UnitedHealth Group] CEO Andrew Witty is required to use corporate jets for all business travel and is encouraged to use them for personal travel. Is it unusual that UnitedHealthcare’s Thompson didn’t appear to have personal security around him when he was murdered on the way to the company’s investor meeting? Not at all, told Glen Kucera, president of enhanced protection services at Allied Universal, a company that provides protection to executives in many industries. “There are executives walking the streets of New York every day without executive protection,” Kucera told Livingston. But he added that “this is a big wake-up call.”
This is a developing story. We will provide updates as new developments warrant.
