Just old enough that he needs his own insurance, likely doesn’t have employer-subsidized coverage, living with chronic back pain that his new provider probably won’t cover. He’s got money, but he’s probably not independently wealthy to the point of being able to pay full price for medical care out-of-pocket in an economy where it can cost six figures just to give birth and the hospital food they feed you afterward gets billed at rates that would be excessive if the maternity ward had a Michelin star.
I think one reason people sympathize with him, despite his privilege, is that his situation (if the internet crumbs have been correctly interpreted) may be the first he’s ever experienced in which his family’s money was incapable of giving him what he truly wanted, and he became simply a newly disabled person screwed over by the health care system, which is sadly relatable regardless of his background.
I just saw a brief video of the perp being taken to court last night for his arraignment (in which bail was of course denied). What struck me was the CNN commentator’s description of that court appearance. He was apparently lucid, coherent, and when specifically asked if there was anything about his mental health the court should know about, said that there was not.
Looks like he’s not even going to try for an insanity defense. He’s toast. I predict life without the possibility of parole, or maybe possibility of parole after something like 25 years.
"An outlaw folk hero isn’t popular because of the person, they’re popular because their actions strike against an oppressive system in a way that brings people a sense of justice and symbol of liberation.
The actual person is probably usually a dickhead but that has never mattered."
I frankly am amazed those photos were enough for someone to recognize him. Hell, there are pictures of myself I don’t recognize. He looks like dozens of people I see around Chicago—in fact specifically reminds me of a Greek contractor I worked with this summer. Maybe if he was wearing the same hooded coat as in the picture, that would be a clue, but all the arrest photos just show him in a dark blue or black sweatshirt of some sort.
Found a Bloomberg article on UnitedHealth’s morning.
It was only after Witty, the CEO of the parent company, began the meeting that some executives were pulled aside by security and told that Thompson was dead.
Witty was told after his opening remarks, and by that time phones were going off with news alerts and texts. At 9 am Witty cancelled the meeting.
The rest of the article is worth a read. It gives glimpses of how the vitriol about the health care insurance industry has started to affect the rank and file workers and their perception of their jobs:
Some employees grappled with the idea that their paychecks were padded in part by the practice of denying care.
The episode made them question whether they could keep working for UnitedHealth both mentally and morally, this person said.
When I first read that it was before my first caffeine of the morning and I thought you wrote SCP Huntingdon, which was an entirely different vibe.
I’ve got some smarts myself, and some of those smarts tell me that I’m not as clever in regards to crime scene evidence as people who investigate crime for a living. Something these smart, young men seem to not grasp. It’s a lot harder to get away with this sort of thing than it was 100 years ago due to advancements in forensic science.
The dribs and drabs we have about the shooter have back surgery makes me wonder if it was his personal journey through the health insurance meat grinder that led to his actions.
^ This.
I’ve been riding Amtrak for 40 years now. The security on trains is nowhere near that of airplanes, and my one and only inter-city bus ride was the same. Which is probably why this guy was riding busses to and from NYC.
Don’t prisoners get all medically required medical care…?
No, the story was horribly reported and got distorted via a game of telephone. From the original NY Post reporting:
Mayor Adams declined to say whether investigators already had the suspect’s name when asked at a Harlem event.
“We don’t want to release that now,” Adams said. “If we do, we are basically giving a tip to the person we are seeking and we do not want to give him an upper hand at all. Let him continue to believe he can hide behind the mask. We revealed his face. We’re going to reveal who he is and we’re going to bring him to justice.”
Eric Adams was specifically saying that revealing whether the NYPD had his name or not would help the killer in his typical Eric Adams bluster that as much revealed that the NYPD definitely didn’t have his name and he was coming up with an ass covering excuse as to why. In any case, we now have confirmation from other sources that the NYPD definitely did not have his name at the time of apprehension.
For all the people calling the shooter’s decisions dumb, I can’t imagine any scenario in which these were not deliberate actions by the shooter to get caught. All of these fantasies of escaping to a foreign country or living off the grid for years at a time fail to take into account the personal psychological toll. I think the shooter was always planning to get caught eventually and he had mentally prepared for 2 or 3 days of freedom so when the police were more incompetent than he thought and continued to fail to make progress, the pressure got too much for him and he’d rather be caught in a situation he could control than be constantly looking behind his shoulder his entire life. He wanted everything on him so there could be no doubt.
It’s interesting to think about the mindset of the Altoona cop that went to the McD to check on the situation. Probably for the last 4 days, every police department in the country had been inundated with calls from every Nextdoor Karen about some spurious sighting and he probably figured out it was again some random bullshit call. If the shooter had just acted totally casually, there would have been no pre-textual justification for a search and even if they had searched, if he had discarded everything incriminating, then there was no justification for holding him. He seems to have deliberately engineered a sequence of events where he could be caught by a policeman who was not at all interested in catching him.
I’m aware of that, but all things considered it sounds like United must have found some way of not paying for the treatment he needed, and that was what motivated him to kill. Perhaps they (or their AI) decided that it was “unnecessary care”, or the plan on the individual market that he could afford doesn’t provide enough coverage to make it affordable.
(I could be completely off on this. I’ve never had to shop for insurance because the employee-owned company I work for subsidizes our coverage to the point of it being almost free.)
That’s a great article, thanks for posting the link.
Sadly, there’s nothing substantive that UnitedHealthcare or any other private health insurer can do about it. The things that have the public enraged are intrinsic to the insurance business.
To an extent I sympathize with Thompson – he was an insurance business executive doing what insurance business executives do; it was just his misfortune and those of millions of his fellow Americans that what insurance companies do is fundamentally incompatible with ethical and compassionate human health care.
