IHIP News - Murder of Insurance CEO Reveals Deep FRUSTRATIONS with US Healthcare System

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

The recent public execution of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has elicited a very strong reaction from the American public. Thank you to our sponsors: Aura Frames: Exclusive $35-off Carver Mat at https://AuraFrames.com. Use code IHIP at checkout to save! Green Chef: Go to https://greenchef.com/ihip50 and use code ihip50 for 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next two months! PRE-ORDER OUR NEW BOOK and find live tour dates + more by clicking here: https://linktr.ee/ivehaditpodcast Follow Us: I've Had It Podcast: @Ivehaditpodcast Jennifer Welch: @mizzwelch Angie "Pumps" Sullivan: @pumpspumpspumps Special thanks to @cnraun for the IHIP Theme SongSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to IHIP News. Today I would like to discuss with you the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. And first and foremost, what's so shocking about it, it's on video, it's clearly targeted, it's some sort of execution that was intended, premeditated, et cetera. When I saw it, I was like, oh my gosh, that's terrible. What a horrible, horrible thing to happen. I'm sure he was some CEO of a healthcare company, et cetera. And then obviously people start investigating who he is, what his job is. And the online response to this death has been really, really surprising. And so I kind of want to dig into that, how the American public can see somebody executed

on video, who's married, who has two children, this very violent act and what the responses are. But before we get to the responses of the death, we have to go backwards and read from his LinkedIn profile. So UnitedHealthcare is the largest private insurance provider. And any CEO's job is to cut costs, maximize profits. And when you cut costs for health insurance, basically you're denying people health care. So Brian Thompson posts on his a year ago on his LinkedIn.

We work every day to find ways to make slash hashtag health healthcare more affordable, including reducing the cost of saving prescription drugs. I'm proud of the work we're doing. Andrea responds, Brian Thompson, this seems like a laudable mission, but UnitedHealth Group is failing my mother by not providing her basic care to get better and back her life. You continue to delay any decision making and authorizing, which is compromising her health even more. And if she doesn't get back to her baseline, United Health Group is partially responsible. Beatrice responds, this message is an example

of hypocrisy at its finest. You are denying claims for people who need it. Nicholas responds, the only thing this company is good for is screwing their customers. And it goes on and on and on, on his LinkedIn page, people talking about the company denying health claims. Here's one from a guy named Kale. Hey, Brian, I just spent an hour on the phone battling to get general information for my wife with stage four cancer. She's 45 year old mother of four with an abnormal EGFR gene. I'd love to share my experience with you. And then he gives his cell phone number. And so, you know, in the United States of America, we always talk about how rich we are, how powerful we are, free markets, etc. But there is a massive problem with health care that people who live in other first world countries cannot wrap their head around how people can die or go bankrupt because they're sick. It's interesting to me that, like you said,

we're the richest, we're the best, we're all these things, smartest, most arrogant for sure. But the only first world country in the world that has a term, medical bankruptcy, is the United States, because other countries provide health care to their citizens. And Republicans do not want poor people to have health care, full stop. Insurance companies, in my opinion, they are more interested in providing for their stockholders and their CEOs and their executives than they are care needed by their insured. And so the comments on the LinkedIn page do not surprise me how that would be a trigger for some people, especially struggling. You hear all the time about people that need surgeries, they need care, they need this medication, and they can't have it because the insurance company want to prove it. So it is a very messed up system.

There is absolutely no doubt. So they make record, record profits, these insurance companies. So this guy gets shot, which I do not condone that type of vigilante violence. That is horrific. It was horrible to watch, especially recently somebody we love was shot. And so anytime you see gun violence, it just really makes me sick to my stomach. But this is an opportunity for the country to have a discussion about this gaping hole in our system where we value profits over everything else.

And all of these Republican politicians want to talk about Judeo-Christian values, Judeo-Christian values. These people that go nonstop about the Judeo-Christian values only value prophets time and time and time again. They're megachurch pastors, only value profit. You rarely hear about this outreach of going to help people that are experiencing medical bankruptcy in a church taking all of their billions of dollars to go lift a family up and provide health care. Never. It's come to our coffee shop, come take a swim in our dunk tank. It's just disgusting. So anyway, after he was executed, story goes up on TikTok, on Instagram, blah, blah.

Here are some of the responses from people. Justin says, I'm sorry. Prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers. DNA says sending prior authorization denied claims, collections and prayers to his family, because this is exactly what happens to the American public when somebody they know has died because the insurance company has valued profit over human beings. Somebody else responds, was his trip to the ER really emergent? According to his own company, my husband's heart attack wasn't an actual emergency.

We were out 3K. Somebody else responds, it's crazy what my first thought was. And then I look at the comments and realize I'm not alone in my thoughts. So clearly you have millions of people in the American public that have had to try to wrangle this free market Judeo-Christian Republican hellscape where all they talk about on the one hand is family values, Judeo-Christian values. We found Jesus Christ as our Lord and personal Savior, family, family, family. And they hold and captivate the American public with that. And then behind their backs, it is free markets, corporations, supply side Jesus, Jesus is this huge capitalist, etc., etc. So you have a company that their number one goal is to make billions of dollars.

And to do that, to make those billions of dollars for their shareholders, they are telling people with cancer, with life-threatening illnesses, or even preventative care, no, our bottom line is more important to you. And that's why you have this reaction online. And this is such a missed opportunity for politicians. It's amazing to me that I have not seen anybody get up a politician, an elected leader right now in the last two or three days, because this story has captivated the country and say, number one, gun violence, vigilante violence is never acceptable. We need to keep our community safe.

But another story that's developing here is the lack of empathy that many Americans have because the insurance company showed zero empathy, showed zero empathy for all of these millions of Americans that work hard, do what they're supposed to do, pay taxes, and then they have this shitty insurance and they get denied and denied and denied. I was not surprised with the sentiment against the insurance companies. I think all of that is justified. But just the disregard for the fact that a man was gunned down. I mean, I'm not making a comment whether he was a good guy or a bad guy. It seems to me what he's doing is not helping his insured.

But the fact that so many people immediately went to, oh, well, you know, I have to get pre-authorization. I mean, it's just really, it was crass. I was just, I was surprised. But then I thought, you know, MAGA has created that in us, Twitter. No, it's bigger than that. If your kid, if you're a working class mom, and you work two jobs, and you do everything you're supposed to do in life and your kid gets leukemia and you're trying to make their appointments and you're trying to pay your bills and pay your rent and you see your child suffering and then you file the claim and you've done your end of the bargain and you've paid your monthly fee to the insurance company

and they deny the claim or they make you come out of pocket a ton of money and you've paid your monthly fee to the insurance company and they deny the claim or they make you come out of pocket a ton of money and you see that kid suffering and you see the greed, you see the corporate greed, which is crass. It is the most evil, crass there is. The response to his execution is equal to that because that's the way his company that he headed treated them. So you have to put yourself in the position of somebody who's been denied this type of health care. And this is a missed opportunity that Democrats in particular have not campaigned enough on.

Bernie Sanders did, and it was wildly popular. But in general, this last election cycle, we never heard about it. Barack Obama campaigned on this extensively, and then he passed the Affordable Health Care Act. And I remember him constantly talking about his mother while she was dying of cancer with stacks and stacks and stacks of paper in the hospital, trying to navigate the bureaucracy of the insurance company and how to get them to pay for her chemotherapy. And that was something that was very relatable. And so the Democrats have a problem that they've lost the working class to the greedy oligarchs. And so I am still saddened that this man was executed. I think it's absolutely

terrible. But I certainly understand if somebody I loved, and I didn't have good insurance, and I didn't have a fat bank account to just absorb whatever the insurance company dicked me over, and I saw my kids suffering, and then I saw this corporate greed, God damn right, I'd probably respond to the TikTok in the same way. See, I think all of that is valid. I think the responses are valid. It was surprising to me the lack of empathy for a dead person. But I understand what you're saying. It just still struck me how flippant people were about something being executed in Midtown Manhattan. But one thing I was going to tell you, did you see that he was under investigation? Yes.

For what was it? Insider trading? Insider trading. There's a DOJ investigation that they knew had started and he dumped his stock. But we don't know why this happened. I just want to go back to what you said. That the expectation is that all of these people have to have all of this empathy. But then this working class people that do everything right, somehow there's deference given to the insurance company to not have empathy for them.

There's deference given to the Republican Party for valuing profits and not valuing them. And let me illustrate this for you precisely. Matt Walsh, Republican right-wing nutjob, okay, he sends out a tweet and he says, the left is outright praising the first degree murder of a health insurance CEO because he's a white male. If he was the CEO of the same company, but was a black woman, you would not be seeing any of the gloating and celebration. I hope everyone understands this basic point. And what I have to say to Matt Walsh and all of the people that liked and retweeted all of that stuff is I hope you understand basic math. And I hope you understand basic critical thinking. And the basic math on this Matt Walsh is out of all Fortune 500 those, 0.4% are black women. 88.8% are white males. So whenever there is a large group of black women that value profit over treating people with cancer, life-threatening illnesses, or even just

getting a preventative healthcare checkup, Whenever there's a big group of black women saying, you know what, we got to report to our shareholders. I've got a responsibility to my shareholders. Then, yeah, we can pile on there. But it seems to always be white men, white men in the GOP and in the MAGA movement that feign that they care about the general public. They act like they give, oh my gosh, we love family. It's all about the kids.

Life. All of this bullshit. And then behind the scenes, they are in the pocket of every single CEO. Look at the incoming Trump administration. To date, five billionaires, five billionaires in his cabinet. And then you have Jeff Bezos, who wants for absolutely nothing, who said he's so optimistic. He's so optimistic about Trump's second term. You know, isn't optimistic the 99% of black women that are not Fortune 500 CEOs, because they know exactly what all of those billionaires are going to do.

And they're going to go for profit, and they're going to deny services and care for people, and it especially trickles down to that community. And so I think Matt Walsh making this about race is a conversation I want to have, because 0.4%, 0.4% of Fortune 500 CEOs are Black women. And that is by design. That is by the way this country was set up, that it is the most difficult for them to advance because we favor these shareholders and we favor these profits. And I certainly understand because I'm so fiercely loyal of those that I love. And if somebody I loved was denied health care while they were suffering for some greedy corporation and somebody then expected me, put the burden on me to give deference to them, I don't know that I could do it. Yeah, I mean, it is really it is a conversation we're missing.

Why is health? Because this guy put on the bullets, I think, delay and depose etched on the bullets. Now, I don't know if that maybe that's like a ruse or whatever, but I guess there was a book about health care denying claims, delay, depose, deny. That was it's like a book that was written about insurance. Yes. But it just seems to me that this opens the floodgates of why are people so mad? We have all this evidence.

People are mad about healthcare and about insurance companies. And then within the last 24 hours or 48 hours, Blue Cross Blue Shield or Anthem, however it's called in different states, says we are going to deny anesthesia care if it goes over a certain amount of time prescribed in our guidelines.

They've now reversed that. But I'm just like, here we have people that aren't medical doctors, that aren't in the operating room telling somebody when and when they can't use anesthesia while they're already in surgery. I mean, it is so gross. But I don't have any expectation that the new leadership coming in is going to address these problems. The reason people are so mad is because the system is rigged against them. They do everything

they're supposed to do, pay their insurance monthly, work their jobs, pay their bills, can't get ahead. And the shareholders make record profits, billions and billions and billions of dollars. 68,000 Americans die annually because of the negligence of these insurance companies. That's why there's anger. And that's why a lot of these people have a hard time finding empathy for that. And I don't condone that. I oppose gun violence. I don't think that's the avenue to solve any problem. But the reason that there is anger and a lack of empathy towards him is because for decades, for decades, people have valued profit over human beings and used religion to justify it and to weaponize it.

And that's why they're so mad. They have every right to be mad. All right, guys, we'll see you later.