Monday, January 20, 2025
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ECONOMY

Murder and Social Murder: The Case of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson

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Rolling Stone weighed in on what those who check into Twitter or TikTok have probably already noticed: Social Media Has Little Sympathy for Murdered Health Insurance Exec. At this point, there is comparatively little new news about the killing of UnitedHealth’s Brian Thompson in Manhattan even though it’s over a full day since the event.1 Police are under great pressure to solve a high profile murder quickly. The perp apparently was in the vicinity before the shooting, it’s not yet clear how long, although some opine not very long. He shot Thompson twice, once in the calf and once in the torso. Gun mavens (we have a tweetstorm below) explain how the weapons choice and gun handling caught on film reveal him not to be a pro.2

In case you have not heard, UnitedHealth was a standout denier of insurance claims, which is a fraud that these companies get away with on a pervasive basis. Our tale of tweets below shows not just barely coded views that Thompson’s death was karma, that the claim denials from which he profited resulted not just in dozens but likely hundreds, even thousands of preventable deaths, even though vigilante justice is not a socially desirable way to achieve redress.

Frankly, I am surprised something like this has not happened sooner. It’s not hard to think of cases of the C-suite killing people for fun and profit. Ford Pintos. Opioid makers with addiction creating sales strategies, with Purdue Pharma the lead but far from only actor. Vioxx, where Merck gamed the clinical trial data to hide extra heart attack deaths, which were so frequent that when the drug was taken off the market, that US mortality rate declined. Monsanto (now Bayer), where the company would have its staff apply the Roundup weedkiller only in heavy-duty protective gear, but never issued similarly stern warnings to customers.

A close ally during the foreclosure crisis described some of his cases from his days as a class action and even individual tort lawyer on mesothelioma cases. The end state of the cancer is horrific, with the patients often having their ribs break as the cancer both fills up their chest cavity and greatly constricts their breathing capacity. In one, which I gather was not atypical, the defense attorneys kept deposing him, 10 hours a day, days on end, in his deathbed in the hospital. They were not just trying to catch him in an inconsistency. They were trying to kill him faster via the stress and reduction of sleep so he would not be able to testify in court.

He lived long enough to do so. The spectacle of him being wheeled in, with an oxygen tube and dressed to show his distended upper torso was so appalling to jury that it was not hard to establish that he had been desperately harmed, merely firming up how the defendant was responsible.

My contact had to stop doing these cases. It was too psychologically draining even though he would win big awards.

And then the defense bar got good at finding ways to escape meaningful punishment. For instance, Alabama had once been a good venue for this sort of case (forgive me for sparing you why). But the state Supreme Court is elected. Those races soon attracted more in campaign donations than any judicial contest in the US. At one point, the chief justice race got $13 million in donations, far more than the governor’s race.

The result was any large damage award in Alabama would be cut back on appeals to $1 million, as in couch lint for a big company.

Now back to Thompson. I’ll let the tweets do the talking since I don’t have much to add.

______

1 I dimly recall from the many episodes of various crime shows my mother liked to have droning on while I was trying to work that trails for suspects get cold after 48 or 72 hours. Better informed views welcome. Perhaps the window has widened with more pervasive surveillance tech.

2 Those of you who consume murder mysteries likely know this already, but a friend who started up a US operation in Moscow in 1993 and says she was the only person in that era to sue a Russian oil company, win in court, collect the money and live to tell the tale, had her ex-KGB driver explain how professional hits work. They take 3 people, A, B, and C. A does the killing. B has hired A. The client hires C, who finds B.

B kills A and is in turn killed by C so as to assure it will be very hard to connect the client to the killing.

A is cheap. B is not.

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