Deborah Copaken on Brian Thompson
If you don't know about Deborah, she wrote a fantastic book called Ladyparts about her journey through our broken healthcare system. She has a newsletter and this was today's issue.
https://deborahcopaken.substack.com/p/a-murder-at-the-hilton
Snip
When the gangland assassination of a 50-year-old husband and father inspires jokes about karma instead of empathy, perhaps the egregious "system" he led as CEO of United Healthcare is to blame.
When I first read the news about a murder outside the Hilton yesterday morning, I was appropriately shocked and horrified. They just shot a 50-year-old man? In cold blood? In front of the frigging midtown Hilton? With a silencer?
Then, when I read that the deceased, Brian Thompson, was the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, I had a moment of ice cold reserve and pause. I remembered what it felt like—minutes before a scheduled surgery on my ears was about to begin, with my surgeon already scrubbed in and ready to operate to try to reverse my sudden-onset deafness from Covid—to be told that my surgery had been deemed “not medically necessary” by United and denied. After which I was sent home to suffer in literal silence. For over a year.
I wrote an article about this in 2022 in the Daily Beast, which they called, “I Learned the Hard Way Just How Barbaric American Health Care Is.” I will reprint it below, because even I, its author, can’t figure out how to sign in to read it.
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