I have been studiously trying to ignore the assassination of Brian Thompson, the late chief executive of the massive insurer UnitedHealthcare. The reason? I have seen a ton of takes on social media and almost without exception they are garbage.
The troubling takes are from apparently “right wing” types who think this is great. Don’t get me wrong, health insurance companies are garbage. Was Brian Thompson a bad guy? I didn’t know him and neither did you, but you don’t get to the top of a company with over 400,000 employees, revenue north of $370,000,000,000 and that ranks 8th on the 2024 Fortune Global 500 without being at least a little bit ruthless.
Here are my two big problems with the spin we are seeing.
First, without knowing much about the alleged killer, and I don’t have a ton of confidence the pics are of the right guy because They habitually lie about everything, at least a few things struck me. First off, unlike some pissed off guy who had a family member deny because of a coverage issue, he seemed pretty chill about the shooting. He was smart going in and smart going out. I think the dude was out of New York City and headed somewhere else before the body got cold meaning he had a solid plan and probably help.
Why he did it we don’t really know. Not at all. The stuff supposedly written on the shell casings about “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” could be a legitimate message or a smokescreen. A backpack belonging to the shooter, again allegedly, was filled with Monopoly money meaning it was intended to be found. So was that another message or another smokescreen? In short, we know jack-shit about who this guy was and why he did this.
We apparently know that in 46 minutes from killing his target the alleged shooter was at a bus station. Did he take a bus somewhere? That hasn’t been revealed yet but thanks to the normalization of wearing masks, criminals now walk around in disguise and no one questions them. I mapped it out and you can drive from Central Park across the Canadian border in Quebec in just over five hours. If it were me I would take a bus south somewhere to Philadelphia where I had a car waiting somewhere without cameras and would have hightailed it to Canada but as I keep saying we don’t know why he did what he did.
Think about this. What are the likely leanings of a guy who assassinates the chief executive of an insurance company? If we assume it wasn’t a murder-for-hire by his wife, what sort of group would be more likely to be behind this? It seems pretty unlikely to be a right-wing group and far more likely to be a radical leftist outfit, ala “Occupy Wall Street” just as the two would-be assassins targeting Trump were liberal loons.
If you have been paying attention you will have seen a decided shift in leftist rhetoric from protesting and breaking windows of McDonald’s to talking a lot more about “punching Nazis” and arming themselves. Remember these fruitcakes are claiming that racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia are “literally violence” and that if you don’t pretend a boy wearing panties is really a girl then you are responsible for their suicide. The rationale for shooting a health insurance executive that no one has heard of before this is little different from rationalizing shooting you or me for being “racist”. These aren’t good people and this isn’t an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” scenario. Sometimes both sides are your enemy.
The other issue: What will change as a result of this murder?
Nothing
CEOs across the corporate world will demand and get increased private security. In the grand scheme that cost is minimal but it will be yet another corporate perk. It will likely lead to even more security for other powerful people from government executives to members of Congress. It will turn out to be a huge boon for private armed security firms as the wealthy and powerful become even more insulated from the crap they do that harms normal people.
There will be a push to make suppressors more difficult to obtain, just at a time when the approval period has shrunk substantially from over a year to weeks or even days. The New York Slimes has already published a story with the bold scare line that there are 5 million suppressors before a much smaller line pointing out that they are almost never used in actual crimes.
Fortunately with Trump coming into office and a mildly 2A friendly SCOTUS, not much will change but it might make it harder to push to make suppressors easier and less expensive to buy.
Here is one thing that won’t change:
How insurance companies do business.
Not a single person that was going to be denied coverage will be approved as a result of this.
Not. One.
But…but…but…they are back peddling on the decision to not cover the duration of anesthesia! Sure, for right this second because it was causing bad press. They were already covering it before, they will just keep covering it until they can get away with not covering it.
People like Brian Thompson are hired with one goal: to maximize shareholder returns. All of the other stuff they talk about is just static.
I worked in financial services and banking for many years and when you cut through the crap, it was all about maximizing returns. The next quarterly results are never more than 13 weeks away and the push is always to keep hitting those numbers. When I was a bank manager my main metric to decide if I was successful or not was opening checking accounts because that is the metric that Wall Street was looking at, so if I closed a checking account for a 19 year old kid and then opened a new one for him, that was considered a plus one in my results. New checking accounts and more fee revenue was the name of the game so banks would present the largest items first to maximize overdraft fees. For example:
At five o’clock on Friday Joe had $500 in his checking account.
Over the weekend on Saturday and Sunday he made a number of small purchases, let’s say $8, $14, $123 and $67. He has plenty to cover those expenses and his debit card would have approved them. Unfortunately Joe forgot about his $550 rent check and that cleared the bank on Friday night. Instead of paying the four smaller amounts and then overdrawing his account on the single large check, the bank would pay his items in order of largest to smallest so the rent check hits first and overdraws his account. He gets a $30 overdraft fee but then the other four items are also presented after the check and as he is already overdrawn, all four of those also overdraw his account to the tune of an additional $120 in fees.
When Monday rolls around, Joe went from a positive $500 balance to a negative $412 and to make things better if he doesn’t get his account back into the positive he would start to accrue daily fees for being at a negative balance.
This might have changed, there was talk about it, but that is how it worked when I was in banking and like clockwork on Mondays I would get people coming into my office who were absolutely buried in overdraft fees. The system was designed to do exactly that and that is partly why banks love opening checking accounts for young people who are more likely to screw up and accumulate overdrafts. I had customers that would do that all the time and pay my branch hundreds in fees each month. That was a major driver of revenue for my book of business and that sort of mindset is one reason why I got out of it. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror.
Are the people who I knew that stayed in banking evil people? Not most of them. Mostly they were just people that had stumbled into a pretty nice paying job. I claim no moral high ground because I got out when they stayed.
Maximizing profits is the name of the game in corporate America. I think in the long term it is a poor way to do business and while not illegal in any sense, it often encourages unethical behavior but until something changes at a more fundamental level, that is how businesses will operate and let’s get real. Lots of people taking glee at some dude being gunned down from behind are also looking at the 401(k) statements and basking in how much money their accounts are making as a result of the very business practices that they think justified the murder of a man.
Is UnitedHealthcare an especially bad company? Compared to what exactly? What about companies like Apple that have at best very questionable labor practices at their overseas factories that include stuff that would be felonies in America. That doesn’t stop the cheerleaders for the killing of Brian Thompson from delighting in his killing by typing on their Apple devices. Or who shop at Amazon and Walmart and Dollar Tree for consumer goods made by those same questionable practices.
We are all quite selective in our outrage at corporate America and there is a very long list of people who deserved a bullet ahead of Brian Thompson and many of the same people cheering his demise would put you near the top of that list.
Talk about spin: I here accumulate several one-off articles positing that the shooter AND the victim were in cahoots, a “Jussie Smollett” event!
Clue? The shooter has to clear his semiautomatic at least once. Why? Because (say the conspiracy theorists) a blank cartridge may not cycle as well as a standard round; the slide–were it to not cycle or not cycle fully–would require that extra “racking” by the perp to manually cycle the next round(s).
Looked at with the above in mind the video makes more sense (cycling a blank) than that the perp was so inept as to run an assassination with a dirty gun or be unfamiliar with its workings.
Why would the victim participate in the event? Well, he could a). desire to disappear from his current life, bailing out to live the good life on some beach or, b). he was set to testify against “whomever” and didn’t want any part of it (snitches get stitches?) or, c). who knows?
Someone, in a similar vein, posited that the victim could come back to live among his family as a long-lost “brother” or “relative” of the deceased. I kid you not!
This stuff makes my head ache. No wonder you held off commenting, Arthur. Look at my post here, a veritable coo coo bird explanation of the event.
Then again, could I be right?
Maybe he is living in Israel with Epstein?
There are many who believe that Epstein lives; that he has a Black Book and a cache of names/photos/videos of the world’s perverts.
Then there were those ear comparisons showing that the guy on the slab could not have been Epstein (ears have more loci for identification purposes than a fingerprint).
Given the number of surveillance cameras in NYC, it’s not implausible or improbable that the murder would be recorded by one. But even so, the framing of this act in the camera’s view was as close to perfect as it could have been. And the footage available to the public immediately.
I am still trying to figure out how this guy managed to get away, with every square inch of Manhattan covered by multiple security cameras. Not even counting the numerous eyewitnesses with cellphones. He doesn’t even have the natural advantage of dark skin, and yet he escaped on…a bicycle?!? There has to be footage of his every movement for miles from the kill zone as he pedaled away. Seems to me that a drone dropping a grenade would have made a far better method of attack if it was his intention to escape.
Backpack. Hoodie. Bicycle. It doesn’t get much more low-tech than that.
He had a plan and that makes a big difference, like the story said he was at a bus depot in about 45 minutes from the shooting. He knew they were tracking his movements and left the backpack with monopoly money where it would be found.
They are not as powerful as they want us to believe.
Not only that…but imagine being on a jury. They present all the information that he’s guilty, but hell. At the end of the day, all you see is a guy in a sweatshirt shooting a guy in a suit.
This is only the first of the historical and certain reaction to the place our society has gotten. Everybody kept asking when the shooting would start, so now they know.
It will be interesting indeed to see what happens next, I am going to put my money on nothing. This likely is a one off like 9/11
Sir,
Your last two paragraphs bring to mind something or other about being without sin… or maybe it was about living in glass houses…..
Anyway, hypocrisy is fast becoming the third most common element in the universe. You make some excellent points.
It’s not only government that can’t keep the story together….
We are all complicit in the system to some extent
Art is right, of course. But two things I’ll add:
1. Jumping to conclusions is the 2nd biggest national past time (after bitching, which remains solidly in first place), and
2. The CEO of UHC made a perfect avatar for our collective hatred of the healthcare system and the financial rape it commits against us all (even if we aren’t using it).
With those I mind, most of the comments (including my own, posted elsewhere since the incident occured) are products of supposition and wishful thinking intended to convey our distaste for this system. Maybe a denied claim was the motive, maybe it was something else entirely. It’s quite likely we’ll never know for certain. But it is a widely held sentiment that we like to see our (perceived) enemy get fucked, so that is the psychological mechanism at work driving most people’s publicly posted gloating over this.
If nothing else, this incident has been quite useful in revealing the public sentiment towards the healthcare industry, and it isn’t pretty. I’m not at all surprised by that, but apparently a lot of ivory tower types have been taken back by it. Good, let them shit themselves for a while.
I remain firmly of the view that the only solution to the healthcare scam is it’s complete collapse. And that is coming, the numbers simply aren’t workable anymore. The expenditures on CMS are going to swallow the federal govt whole, and there is no way they can fund it as it presently exists. They can’t increase tax revenues or engage in further cost shifting to do so. Therefore, it’s dead in the water, probably as soon as next year. Obammycare was the last Hail Mary pass to cover the system’s ass, and that card has been played with no repeat performance available.
As I see it, the most likely outcome is a crash and burn, in which the entity that made all the promises that can’t be kept will cease to exist, and thereby will absolve itself of any further responsibility for trying to maintain even a pretense of keeping them. For those with serious chronic health issues, what is coming will probably be a death sentence. Quality, and even mere availability of healthcare outside of absolute bare basics will be be nonexistent for a period of time, and how long that is depends on how long our national bankruptcy lasts, and exogenous events like war that may prolong our economic misery.
Deep down everyone knows the system is busted, and loves to hate on it. The dead CEO is just the latest tangible object onto which we can transfer that seething hatred. A few years ago it was dancing nurses (I still detest those smarmy fuckers). It won’t change a damn thing, but it feels good in the moment. And that’s about all a lot of people have to cling to these days.
The system isn’t sustainable with millions of Boomers entering the most health care intensive stage of life and at some point it will come down to this: do we pay for gibs for younger non-Whites or health care for old White people. Guess where it will come down.
Read that they are paying young people over in Britain to off their grandparents by assisted suicide wonder how true that it but wouldn’t doubt it and could see that very thing coming here by government or insurance companies…
The problems go far behind just medicare and boomers. Those of us not old enough for that yet are getting wrecked. Premiums and deductibles are so high that they are simply not tenable any longer for a lot of people. Their growth has outstripped the capacity of incomes to continue buying health insurance. And yet, all are forced to because obammycare decreed that all shall be extorted to prop up the system.
Health insurance as presently constituted actually isn’t. It’s an extortion racket. It’s the Mafia showing up and saying “nice net worth you’ve got there, be a shame if anything happened to it. Now fuck you, pay me!” The price differentials for “negotiated rate” versus paying out of pocket in case clearly demonstrates this.
The rank inefficiencies introduced by “insurance” (big fancy offices full of administrators, lawyers, fancy computer systems and software running on them, plus countless cubicle monkeys) are a huge parasitic drain on the money spent on healthcare in total. None of these fuckers work for free, and yet not a single one of them contributes anything tangible to patient care. They are purely overhead, and they are legion. Their paychecks depend on the status quo being maintained, and therefore it is in their best interest to make sure they can continue to screw us with full sanction and complicity of the government.
That’s where it stands, and obammycare was a patch applied to keep it going (for a while longer) the last time they ran out of rope (which is to say “other people’s money”). Now they are near the end of the line again, with no more miracles to be pulled out of somebody’s ass. So crash and burn it will be. And honestly, fuck ’em, I’m tired of this bullshit. The rat race is over and the rats won. Now we need an exterminator to kill all the rats so we can have a clean slate to start over and find a better way. That may not be a panacea either, but what we have now is absolutely unworkable and cannot be continued indefinitely into the future. Thereby, it won’t be.
And all that doesn’t even touch on the fact that so much of modern medicine has been discredited. COVID was the revelatory mechanism for that, and so the only thing modern western medicine actually delivers on consistently is triage. It can save people with severe acute injuries (who might otherwise be certain to die) but most of the rest of it, especially regarding chronic conditions is junk. We know the COVID vaxxes were garbage. From that point, we’ve been working our way back through a huge backlog of false claims, with other vaccines and formerly unassailable medical practice being revealed as so much shite. A lot of long standing medical orthodoxy now looks like a fancier version of the old travelling snake oil salesman.
And yet again we can see an entire industry with that uniquely American way of operating: the more money we throw at it, the shittier the outcome becomes. Government, education, healthcare, all of it seems to be caught in that paradigm. Funny how that always happens. At some point an admission has to be made: “this suck and isn’t working, so we need to stop doing it this way”. While that won’t be done voluntarily, it will be forced upon us soon enough.
They’re still making the old people pay. Medicare is still charged you after 65 (proportional to income but never zero if you are drawing Social Security) and you can elect to deduct it from your Social Security payment.
The new enemy of my old enemy is almost certainly still my enemy…
The American Badass guy, an ex mil who does protective services, was on Tommy’s podcast talking about it. To my memory (everyone’s got theories, so I hope I’m not conflating them) the shooter was a marginally trained, relative newb probably with antifa affiliations. Or he purposed to LOOK like an antifa and do amateurish, antifa like things, such as using an e bike to sell the antifa angle, thereby obfuscating his motive. Matt Everett at American Partisan did a whole podcast on the shooting also and he argues that the shooter is most likely a commie guerilla, self styled as a modern day Che and that the shooting is likely more open, kinetic efforts by the commiefags to get CWIII going. I believe they both asserted that the shooter had help, and both men urged to the effect of “stay alert, stay alive” as there will likely be other similar efforts. According to the mainstream propaganda purveyors NYPD has a fingerprint, the shooter’s dna and very clearly some several photos with which they can pull biometric data. If the shooter remains an unsolvable mystery, like who left the coke at the white house, I would tend to believe that the shooter is on someone’s payroll, and the deceased wasn’t playing ball as he was directed to with someone important.
Interesting to see, and it certainly his focusing attention on their practices.
How much you want to bet the ‘surveillance video’ is AI-generated.
The entire event does not exist Real-World.
The ‘richard thompson’ character is imaginary.
.
What is the magician’s other hand doing.
But, but, but, suppressors are illegal in the glorious CPUSA (D) utopia NYC? (/s)
Saw one that he [CEO] was supposed to testify against Pelousy regarding insider trading.
Gab had a dank snippet of new masks for hoods where you can look like anyone.
Dress up as a black when you are white, a woman when you are man, Hilter, whatever is available.
And it looks seamless with the hood up, like it is real.
Nothing is as it seems in Satan’s playground earth.
exactly!! my reaction is that they show images of someone in a fake/rubber mask
and the whole outfit has already been destroyed and the shooter has been
safely extracted somewhere.
I think many lessons are available here.
1. It’s a big club, you ain’t in it. Must be 1 or 2 murders a day in NYC, no one gives a flying fart, but one rich dude gets whacked, the entire NYPD and FBI gets involved.
1a. There are a couple hundred thousand employees of any big company like this. At most the top 10 are going to have protection. Quaneesha who actually turned down your claim, yeah she ain’t gonna have protection or the whole NYPD caring about her death.
1b. People have to go home sometime.
2. This rings so true with most of the population cuz everyone knows there is no justice system anymore. . it’s starting to break thru. if you can’t get justice, vengeance is going to have to do. Who knew that destroying civilization might be bad?
3. If the FBI is involved (as they apparently are now), a patsy will be found. Almost certainly burned in a fire so unidentifiable by no one except the FBI. They must teach the proper lesson that the big Club cannot be touched and is bad.
4. Most cameras, huge police force (NYPD had something like 40,000 officers 15 years ago probably more than that now), urban area and the dude just disappears……………………. Imagine suburbia with none of that.
5. The e-bike thing is smart. traffic is nuts, cars are out, on foot is out (too slow), motorcycles are too loud. e-bikes can go anywhere and they go up to 30/40 mph which in NYC is pretty quick. no one notices them. If he was really smart he put some delivery thing on it so people think they saw a doordasher.
6. People are angry.
All correct points. Which is why I expect more of this, but on easier to acquire targets. What would be great to see is this sort of action becoming prevalent against dirty judges and prosecutors (like the hideous jewdykecunt in NYC railroading Daniel Penny). If the focus was put squarely on those who misinterpret and pervert the law, a lot of this bullshit would go away right quick.
Oh apparently online is now calling him “The Claims Adjuster”
which i think is hilarious
“Mayhem” marking his spot:>
Count me as one of those who thinks this is going to end up being something very, very different than what people online are saying. Much more than meets the eye here.
https://theburningplatform.com/2024/12/07/covid-vax-genocide-cover-up-united-healthcare-ceo-assassination-solved/
Lineman – there are plenty of far-fetched ‘conspiracy theories’ about Whodunnit and Why… The tendency for people to look for the most Convoluted Explanations to any event with a ‘political’ angle is pretty much a National Pastime now. I’m still considering Occam’s Razor, i.e. the simplest explanation is most likely – someone with a Grudge against the “Healthcare/ Pharmaceutical-Industrial Complex” with the Smarts to Hit a ‘High-Value Target’.
Your basic lefty retard. https://nypost.com/2024/12/09/us-news/person-of-interest-in-fatal-shooting-of-unitedhealthcare-boss-brian-thompson-idd-as-luigi-mangione-an-ex-ivy-league-student/
As an oblique view on the assassination and the reaction of various people to it, there is this from the UK Daily Mail:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14167805/Internet-sleuths-UnitedHealthcare-CEO-Brian-Thompson-assassin.html
OK, I would expect a wide variety of reactions from “Serves him right” to “This is a disgrace” but, if we are to believe that article, a 100% refusal to help is surprising.
Maybe the hatred and malaise is much greater than many people suspect and just because something isn’t widely and openly discussed doesn’t mean that it can be ignored or dismissed.
“This might have changed, ”
No idea if it was yet another thing the Biden thing got rid of, but somewhere towards the end of the Trump administration, I helped a local small-town bank rewrite their software to comply with the new regs, which required that debits to accounts happen in order of presentment to ACH. If two time stamps were the same to the millisecond, both were debited simultaneously. That is, if the sum of the two debits exceeded the available balance, both were overdrafts, even if neither by itself would have been.