The Manhattan shooting of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare

[LennG]

 While I worked for myself, I used to have HIP as our health provider as it was basically all we could afford and they weren't cheap. anyway, when my son was born, he got sick and needed surgery when he was 6 weeks old. To make this long story a lot shorter, he was in intensive care for over 2 weeks. I got a call one night that he wasn't doing well and they needed my permission to do things to try and save him. I asked what the HIP doctor recommended and they told me they couldn't reach them.
Frustrated, they did what was necessary and the next day I went to the hospital and asked who they could recommend as private pediatricians. They recommended someone to us, we used them and they basically saved my son's life. They saw him for the next 2 weeks and he recovered fully. As I dropped my HIP doctor, I also dropped my health coverage, so I was on my own. When I got the bills I was overwhelmed. The amounts were, to say the least way over what I could afford. I set up some payment plans but after about 2 years, I stopped paying and that was about it, I think they all understood. But I still needed a health plan so we had to continue with HIP. To say when I was able to drop them and sign on with a real health plan when my wife went back to work was one of the happiest days of my life. What a farce HIP was.

[DaveBrown74]

One interesting thing about this story is that the victim in this case has had almost no reporting about him or his life. Very little anyway, and I would say infinitesimal compared to the alleged shooter.

The two most dominant themes that have come out of this tragedy are:

(1) Glorification of/fascination with the alleged killer, including fawning over his looks, being obsessed with his rich family, hearing from people who knew him, etc.

(2) Trashing of the insurance industry.

In comparison to the two above story lines, there has been almost nothing written/reported about the father of two who was murdered. It is pretty clear that most people have no interest in hearing anything about him.

[y_so_blu]

I don't condone murder. There are more constructive ways to make a statement about how effed up privatized health insurance is.

But our local news story on his death (he was a Minnesotan) was kind of telling, in that everyone who had anything nice to say about Thompson was either a family member or another rich insurance executive.