“My thoughts & prayers were out of network.” ~ A Facebook post reacting to the shooting of Brian Thompson
The vitriol was swift and caustic. Not against the gunman, Luigi Mangione, but against the victim, UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson. A Facebook post put up by UnitedHealthcare announcing the death of Thompson received 46,000 responses. UHC took the post down when it was discovered that 41,000 of those responses were laughing emojis.
Indeed, reading social media posts, one had to wonder who was the killer and who was the victim.
There’s something uniquely American about healthcare nightmares. The torments go something like this story seen on social media:
“My health insurance denied a PET scan for my husband,” wrote one woman on social media. “He had been diagnosed with a very rare cancer with possible metastatic spread. The first denial claimed it was because he hadn’t had a liver biopsy yet, which he had. The second denial claimed it was because PET scans hadn’t proven their efficacy (they were the ‘gold standard’ test for a decade at that time). The cancer metastasized, and he died six months after diagnosis. He was 51.”
The preceding story begs the question, does one have to pull a trigger to be deemed a killer? Writ large, our broken system is the killer, and it’s a serial killer that’s been at it for decades and decades. The weapons of choice have been, and continue to be, politicians, corporations, executives, courts, and shareholders. And frankly, ourselves. Ourselves for allowing it to go on for decade after decade while screaming about the inequity and cruelty of it all.
Do I condone the murder of a man because he’s the CEO of a healthcare insurer or a pharmaceutical company. No, but more so, I condemn the deaths and ruination of millions of lives in order to gain wealth and to satisfy faceless shareholders. One user on X summed up the quandary quite neatly, “When you shoot one man in the street it’s murder. When you kill thousands of people in hospitals by taking away their ability to get treatment you’re an entrepreneur.”
And while death by denial might not be the outcome of an insurance claim refused, or a procedure delayed for pre approval, the outcome is often financial ruin and/or diminished quality of life.
When Sara England discovered that her infant son, Amari Vaca, who had recently undergone open heart surgery, was in distress, she took the child to the emergency room at Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, California. The doctors, who had to keep the boy alive by putting a tube down his throat and manually pushing air into his lungs with a bag until he was stable enough to go onto a ventilator, told England that the boy needed immediate specialized care at the nearest hospital; care that Natividad was not equipped to provide. When the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center informed doctors that they could care for Amari, the boy was flown by small plane and transported between hospitals and airports on ground ambulances. When the bill for $97,599 was submitted to Cigna, the claim was denied on the grounds that air transport was not medically necessary. Link to full story, here.
David Cordani, the CEO of Cigna, has a net worth of $570 million dollars. He could figuratively pull 98 large out of his pocket, pick off the lint, say ‘keep the change,’ and then go and have a quick $200 dollar lunch at Benjamin Steakhouse Prime. In the meantime, Sara England will likely spend years, if not decades, making herself whole, all the while conserving and foregoing while Mr. Cordani indulges in whatever the fuck strikes his fancy.
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The Life in My Years 