A lawsuit against the insurance company that United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson oversaw, filed just over a year before his assassination this week in Midtown Manhattan, exposed the company’s increasingly stringent claims-denying process.
Last November, the estates of two former UHC patients filed a lawsuit in Minnesota, alleging that the insurer used an AI algorithm to deny and override claims for elderly patients approved by their doctors.
According to the families of the two deceased men who filed the lawsuit, UHC was aware of the algorithm in question, known as nH Predict, which allegedly had a 90% error rate.
As the lawsuit progressed through the courts, anger over the massive insurer’s proclivity to deny claims grew, and speculation about the assassin’s motivations suggests that he was among those dissatisfied with UHC’s coverage.
Though we don’t know who shot Thompson or why, reports say he wrote the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” on the shell casing of the bullets used to shoot the CEO—a message that suggests the killer was outraged by the insurance industry’s aggressive denials of coverage to sick patients.
Aside from the shooter’s motivations, the shockingly celebratory online reaction to Thompson’s murder demonstrates that anger toward American insurance and healthcare systems has reached the point of literal bloodlust.
According to The American Prospect, “only about 50 million customers of America’s reigning medical monopoly might be motivated to exact revenge upon the UnitedHealthcare CEO.”
And the alarming cruelty of the claims around the company’s AI algorithm — we asked the company whether it’s still using it, but received no immediate reply — perfectly illustrates why they’re so angry.
