BREAKING: Evidence of Anti-Managed Care Intent in CEO’s Assassination

One day after the assassination by a gunman of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside the New York Hilton Midtown hotel, the first clues as to the motivation of the gunman, who remains at large in New York City, are pointing to anti-managed care resentment as a factor in the murder.

On Wednesday, Dec. 4, at about 6:45 A.M., Thompson, 50, was walking towards the entrance of the New York Hilton Midtown, as he prepared to lead UnitedHealthcare's annual investor day meeting, when a man wearing a ski mask came up behind him and shot him with a gun with a silencer attached, and then fled on a bicycle, apparently headed into Central Park nearby. New York police continue to be engaged in an intense manhunt, and are tracking down clues.

On Thursday afternoon, CNN’s Amanda Musa and Jason Hanna wrote that “City police are tasked with tracing the assailant’s steps, combing through a mountain of surveillance video and examining evidence he may have left behind 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, though it shows the gunman masked. Video helped investigators determine the suspect’s first moves after the shooting, police said. Police also have 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 hostel located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where investigators have said they believe a suspect may have been staying, and which investigators have searched. Police also have released photos showing someone they say is the suspect at a nearby Starbucks, taken less than 30 minutes before the incident.” Police also believe that the suspect stayed at a hostel in Manhattan, sharing in a multi-person room with two other males.” They have also found a phone and a bottle of water near the scene of the shooting that the gunman may have dropped.

Managed care resentment?

Meanwhile, a major clue might be pointing to resentment of the managed care industry. As the New York Times’s Dionne Searcey and Madison Malone Kircher wrote Thursday afternoon, “Messages that law enforcement officials say were found on bullet casings at the scene of the shooting in front of a Midtown hotel — ‘delay’ and ‘deny’ — are two words familiar to many Americans who have interacted with insurance companies for almost anything other than routine doctor visits.”

What’s more, Searcey and Kircher wrote, “The fatal shooting on Wednesday of a top UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, on a Manhattan sidewalk has unleashed a torrent of morbid glee from patients and others who say they have had negative experiences with health insurance companies at some of the hardest times of their lives. ‘Thoughts and deductibles to the family,’ read one comment underneath a video of the shooting posted online by CNN. ‘Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.’” And, they reported that one TikTok user wrote that “I’m an ER nurse and the things I’ve seen dying patients get denied for by insurance makes me physically sick. I just can’t feel sympathy for him because of all of those patients and their families.”

And they quoted Stephan Meier, chair of the management division at Columbia Business School, who, they said, told them that “[T]he attack could send shock waves through the broader health insurance industry.” “The insurance industry is not the most loved, to put it mildly,” Meier told them. “If you’re a C-suite executive of another insurance company, I would be thinking, What’s this mean for me? Am I next?”

Searcey and Kircher noted that UnitedHealthcare executives had been aware of health plan 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 and Safety, which offers security to some of the largest health care companies in North America, as stating that “The C.E.O.s are quite often the most visible face of an organization. Sometimes people hate on that individual, and wish to do them harm.”

Additional security needed?

Meanwhile, Shelby Livingston, senior health tech reporter at Endpoints News, wrote on Thursday afternoon that “The cold-blooded shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Wednesday sent shockwaves through corporate America, highlighting the threats increasingly faced by healthcare executives and workers, and prompting companies to rethink the measures they take to keep their top brass safe. Because of their high profile, company CEOs often have protective details. And there have been prior cases of top executives who have faced harassment and threats. But this week’s murder was a shocking outlier, and actual violence against top executives is almost unheard of,” she wrote, and quoted J. Mario Molina, M.D., board chair of USofCare and former chairman and CEO of Molina Healthcare, as saying that “I’ve never seen this before,” and that he had never himself received threats, nor had he ever traveled with personal security. “If he was If he was CEO at Molina today though, he said, he’d start thinking about how to protect everyone at the health plan, not just senior executives,” Livingston wrote.

And, Livingston wrote, “As for UnitedHealth, the sole 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 aircraft for all business travel and encouraged to use it for personal travel. Is it unusual that UnitedHealthcare’s Thompson didn’t seem to have personal security around him when he was killed on the way to the company’s investor meeting? Not at all, Glen Kucera, president of enhanced protection services at Allied Universal, a firm that provides protection for executives in many industries, told her. “There are executives walking down the streets of New York every day without executive protection,” Kucera told Livingston. But he added that “This is a huge wake-up call.”

This is a developing story. We will provide updates as new developments warrant.