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The “brazen and targeted” killing of a health insurance executive outside a New York hotel this week shocked America. The reaction to the crime also exposed a simmering rage against a trillion-dollar industry.
“Prior authorisation” does not seem like a phrase that would generate much passion. But on a hot day this past July, more than 100 people gathered outside the Minnesota headquarters of UnitedHealthcare to protest the insurance firm’s policies and denial of patient claims.
Eleven people were arrested for blocking a road during the protest.
Police records indicate they came from around the country, including Maine, New York, Texas and West Virginia, to the rally organized by the People’s Action Institute.
Unai Montes-Irueste, media strategy director of the Chicago-based advocacy group, said those protesting had personal experience with denied claims and other problems with the healthcare system.
They are denied care, then they have to go through an appeals process that’s incredibly difficult to win,” he told the BBC.
The latent anger felt by many Americans at the healthcare system – a dizzying array of providers, for profit and not-for-profit companies, insurance giants, and government programmes – burst into the open following the apparent targeted killing of health insurance executive Brian Thompson in New York City on Wednesday.
A scroll through Thompson’s LinkedIn history reveals that many were angry about denied claims. One woman responded to a post the executive had made boasting of his firm’s work on making drugs more affordable. “I have stage 4 metastatic lung cancer,” she wrote. “We’ve just left UnitedHealthcare because of all the denials for my meds. Every month there is a different reason for the denial.”
Thompson’s wife told US broadcaster NBC that he had received threatening messages before. “There had been some threats,” Paulette Thompson said. ” Basically, I don’t know, a lack of medical coverage? I don’t know details.”
A security expert says that frustration at high costs across a range of industries inevitably results in threats against corporate leaders. Philip Klein, who runs the Texas-based Klein Investigations, which protected Thompson when he gave a speech in the early 2000s, says that he’s astonished the executive didn’t have security for his trip to New York City.
Recent Commonwealth Fund research found that 45% of insured working-age adults were charged for something they thought should have been free or covered by insurance, and less than half of those who reported suspected billing errors challenged them.
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