This year’s unlamented billionaire

WOOF.  That is quite the ratio. The late Brian Thompson has kind of turned into 2024’s Stockton Rush, an obscenely rich man who came to a premature end and no one seems unduly unhappy about that fact. The main difference is that this time someone else did it:

The CEO of UnitedHealthcare, one of the US’s largest health insurers, was shot dead on Wednesday in midtown Manhattan, police confirmed in a press conference.
Brian Thompson, 50, was shot outside the Hilton hotel at 1335 Avenue of the Americas just after 6.45am after arriving early for the company’s annual investor conference. A man wearing a mask approached him and fired at him repeatedly, police said.
Police said they believe Thompson was targeted in the attack. This was a “brazen, targeted attack”, New York’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said, adding that this “does not appear to be a random act of violence”. […]
Officials have said that no arrests have been made yet and that the investigation is continuing. The motive is currently unknown.
Thompson’s wife, Paulette Thompson, told NBC News her husband had received threats.
“There had been some threats,” she said. “Basically, I don’t know, a lack of coverage? I don’t know details. I just know that he said there were some people that had been threatening him.”

I can’t imagine why anyone would want to threaten this guy… oh, UnitedHealthcare is one of the worst health insurers in the US? Bad even by American standards?

Oh. I mean… I suppose that indicates they are paying two thirds of the claims they get, but still. From that Gizmodo article:

Other comments got more personal, with people sharing their stories of being denied coverage by UnitedHealthcare and having to pay large sums of money to survive: “My uncle paid you guys for 22 years without missing a single payment and then when he died you denied his life insurance claim. You even had the nerve to cash a check from him the week he died. Scum bags. Sometimes you get what you deserve. I hope all of you suffer the way my mom has for the past year she has had to endure the nightmare of losing her brother and then almost filing for bankruptcy due to your denial of a life insurance claim paid punctually and faithfully for 22 years. Then you turn around and spit on his corpse. Your empathy claim has been denied. I hope you all get what’s coming.” […]
UnitedHealthcare insures over 49 million Americans, and the company generated $281 billion in revenue last year, according to the Associated Press. The insurance giant is notorious for denying coverage, deploying an artificial intelligence tool that has an error rate of roughly 90%, according to a lawsuit filed last year.

Ah. Gizmodo also tries to rationalise why people are enjoying the show:

It makes sense that Americans might be more loose with their sense of decorum these days. The re-election of Donald Trump to the presidency signaled a kind of right-wing populist nihilism as the Republican leader embraced conspiracy theories, threatened to go after his political enemies, and demonized immigrants in wildly racist ways. The sometimes celebratory attitude of such a broad swath of Americans on Wednesday felt like an embrace of that same sort of nihilism.

But I don’t really believe that cos all this “lol, fuck this guy” reaction online is similar to what we saw last year with the whole Titan sub thing and I don’t think we can entirely blame that on Mushroom Cock’s ascension. Back when Titan happened, this piece speculated on the frankly unpleasant humour people found in it and noted that the amounts of money involved in buying a place on the death ship and how almost all of them were billionaires made it hard to empathise with them. Billionaires are so far removed from most people that even when something objectively terrible happens to them we just can’t care too much about them. I find myself feeling about this, too, like I did with the Titan story; I remain kind unhappy about the idea of actively enjoying someone’s murder, and I remain equally unable to extend fellow feelings towards Brian Thompson. Especially since the latter was actively involved in damaging other people’s lives.

Anyway, for some reason UHC appears to have scrubbed all the information about their other board members from its website, almost like they’re worried someone might go after them next or something. But, from what I read online, Thompson was in town for some company board meeting or something, and the meeting went ahead at the scheduled time anyway despite the fact that Thompson had, you know, just been murdered outside the building where the meeting was going ahead. If this bit is true, then that really gives this sort of vibe:

So maybe the board were less bothered about him than they were themselves? I don’t know. Fuck the lot of them. I’m out of thoughts and prayers for these people.