UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot outside Hilton hotel in Midtown in targeted attack: cops - Just Part and Parcel of visiting a Big City

Electric Pence said:

UnitedHealthcare CEO murder suspect Luigi Mangione's grandma left millions to family — excluding felons​

Damn.
Luigi Mangione: Who are you?!
Grandma: Someone who loathes you.
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If Luigi gets out, nobody's going to let him pay for anything again. We'd put him up in our spare room and take him to dinner if he came to London.
 
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147573952589676412927 said:
I literally do not care what his politics are. He did the right thing. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is going to have stupid politics that you disagree with. If you read history, especially about revolutions you may agree with, you'll find that the individuals involved were a collection of contradictory nonsense politics.

The media and the Internet has given everyone such politic-brain that we completely forget the one thing that unifies us: we of the lower classes are being taken advantage of by rich evil people. No amount of political ideals, meritocracy, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, or voting will change that.

You don't need to agree with everything about a person to endorse an action and the cultural effects it will have. Yes, this will probably fizzle and people will go back to their McDonald's and WWE, but it's also possible another fed up person will see the masses approving of this and be pushed themselves to do the right thing.

So yes, I will celebrate what he did. Even if he is a misguided idealist with goofy thoughts, everyone who has ever done anything that mattered was.

And for the record, I am not a leftist by any stretch of the imagination.
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This is so correct it's worth me simply saying so. Not leftist either. Every corrupt piece of shit in power at the "top" I hope lives in crippling fear daily.
 
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Fapcop said:
That’s not up to the jury though.

The judge decides the sentence, and these fuckers go to dinner parties with CEOs all the time. They know they might be next.

If you’re on that jury and vote for guilty, Luigi is going away for the rest of his life.
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Yeah I think more good could actually be done for society if vigilantes start targeting judges and DAs.
 
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Was wondering when reformed CIGNA executive Wendell Potter would write about this. Here it is:

I used to do health insurance company PR. Here’s what I think the backlash is missing​

Don’t overlook Wall Street’s role in the broken system​

By Wendell Potter
Dec. 11, 2024

The suspect arrested in the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Luigi Mangione, reportedly suffered from excruciating back pain. That is no surprise to the people who have spent the past week sharing stories of health care denied by insurance companies.

Decades ago, the health insurance business put in place a dike to hide and contain the public’s disdain for for-profit health insurers, and to keep reformers at bay. Now, that dike might collapse.

As the former VP of corporate communications at Cigna, I played a role in building and fortifying that dike. Every year, my colleagues and I across the industry devoted massive amounts of the money — money our customers paid us to cover their medical care — on lobbying, campaign contributions, deceptive PR campaigns, and even charitable donations to buy goodwill. All of that was spent for the sole purpose of maximizing shareholder return. Restricting patients’ access to needed care made UnitedHealth, Cigna and a handful of other big insurers Wall Street darlings, and made lots of people lots of money while doing little to enhance care.

Much of that spending was to create the illusion that we Americans are happy with our health care system and don’t want politicians to get any bright ideas about changing it. Just three weeks before the tragic killing of United’s Brian Thompson, AHIP, the industry’s biggest PR and lobbying group, touted a recent “survey” that found “a strong majority are satisfied with their current employer-provided plans.” But I am doubtful. The survey was produced by a D.C. strategic communications firm founded by political operatives to manage corporate reputations and “shape perceptions.” AHIP is funded primarily by big for-profit middlemen whose fortunes depend on remaining in the good graces of those investors and a handful of Wall Street financial analysts. (UnitedHealth left AHIP in 2015, though the group’s current president is a former UnitedHealth executive.)

Media coverage I’ve seen so far of this shocking corporate assassination has failed to explore the Wall Street connection adequately, even though Thompson was in New York for UnitedHealth’s annual investor day. I know how important investor days are to big corporations because I used to help plan Cigna’s. Top executives spend many hours preparing for this day because of who is invited: the institutional investors who own most of the company’s shares and those financial analysts who work at big investment banks and “cover” the industry, like high-paid journalists, for the investment community. Unsurprisingly, patients are not invited to these events and the word “patient” is rarely, if ever, mentioned, while “profit margins” and “shareholder value” are uttered frequently.

In my first book, “Deadly Spin,” I described the last investor day I helped plan. It took place at New York’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel, not far from where Brian Thompson was murdered, in early December 2007. As I recall, Cigna spent a quarter-million dollars of its customers’ money on that six-hour meeting, including $60,000 just to feed the 150 investors, analysts, and Cigna executives who had been invited. Another $50,000 covered the speaking fee of the author of a book extolling the supposed merits of high-deductible health plans, euphemistically marketed at the time as “consumer-driven” health plans (CDHPs), that Cigna and its competitors had begun embracing. The industry’s overall strategy was to move as many health plan enrollees as possible, and as soon as possible, into CDHPs because of their defining feature: a mandate that patients must spend hundreds and often thousands of dollars out of their own pockets before their coverage will kick in.

The investors and analysts were fully on board with this so-called “consumerism” strategy. They knew that the more patients had to pay out of their own pockets for medically necessary care, the more money would be available to reward shareholders.

I would walk away from my job a few months later after a crisis of conscience triggered by the death of a 17-year-old girl just hours after Cigna caved to public pressure and agreed to cover the transplant that, if not for several days of delay, could have saved her life. That incident triggered justifiable public outrage days before that 2007 Cigna investor day, which cost approximately the same amount as the transplant the company initially denied Nataline Sarkisyan. Delays, it turns out, can be just as deadly as denials. And I knew that CDHPs, or whatever “innovation” Big Insurance came up with next, would create new barriers that patients would have to try to overcome to get the care they needed. I didn’t have it in me anymore to keep deceiving the public.

I would ultimately become an industry whistleblower and go on to testify before Congress when lawmakers were debating legislation that would become the Affordable Care Act. My overriding message every time I appeared before a congressional committee was to warn against what I saw as the biggest threat to Americans being able to get the care they need at a price they can afford: the relentless profit demands of Wall Street, its growing entanglement in the health care sector, and how it is adversely impacting patient care.

As I explained to lawmakers — now more than 15 years ago — for-profit insurers like UnitedHealth and Cigna must assure investors and financial analysts every three months that they know how to control their health plan enrollees’ use of medical goods and services so that plenty of their premium dollars can be diverted to profits. Congress would ultimately include language in the ACA to require health plans to spend at least 80% to 85% of premiums insurers take in on enrollees’ care, known as the medical loss ratio. But big insurers have figured out if they also become health care providers — by buying physician practices, clinics, and pharmacy benefit managers — they can meet that threshold by paying themselves and avoiding payment for their customers’ care.

An argument could be made that the medical loss ratio provision of the ACA has contributed to or even fueled the vertical integration of the big insurers, UnitedHealth especially. UnitedHealth is massively bigger and more profitable than it was on the day I first testified as a whistleblower, June 24, 2009, when it ranked 21st on the Fortune 500 list of U.S. companies. Its share price at the close of trading that day was $24.81. Hundreds of acquisitions later, UnitedHealth is now the fourth largest U.S. company — just behind Walmart, Amazon, and Apple. At the end of trading on Monday of this week, the share price was $560.62. That’s an increase of more than 2,100% since June 24, 2009. By comparison, the Dow Jones average has increased 438%.

In the years since then, UnitedHealth, Cigna, and a handful of other New York Stock Exchange corporations have cemented their roles as unelected gatekeepers to care, and Americans are now waking up as they never have before to the consequences of that. If their rage can be harnessed and channeled with clear policy proposals, that dike the industry built might just give way without more violence.

Wendell Potter is former VP, corporate communications, Cigna, and publisher of HEALTH CARE un-covered.
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This is the girl whose preventable death led Powell to resign from CIGNA. I’ve followed him for years, he posts about her every year on her birthday & her death anniversary. Do these pearl-clutching clams on CNN & Fox News ever mention hers or many other innocents’ names when they wag their fingers? A few months after she got death-panelled, her mother protested at CIGNA’s headquarters & told the security desk she wouldn’t leave until reps apologized to her family. CIGNA employees looking down from the atrium heckled her & flipped her off. Anyone confused by the hatred Americans have for these Mammonites is either a demon or a retard.
 
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If someone already posted this, apologies, but this is the story with the missing person notice, and height is listed as 5'10" for those who are obsessed with manlet-posting, lol: article | archive

San Francisco police investigator recognized Mangione from missing person poster: source​

The investigator informed the FBI 4 days before Mangione was arrested, per the source​

By Michael Dorgan , Matt Finn , Christina Coulter , Louis Casiano , Michael Lundin Fox News
Published December 13, 2024 1:49pm EST | Updated December 13, 2024 2:21pm EST

A San Francisco police investigator says he recognized Luigi Mangione – the man charged in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson Mangione – from a wanted bulletin poster made by police and communicated that to the FBI while the suspect was still at large, a police source tells Fox News.

The poster, obtained by Fox News, shows a picture of a smiling Mangione and states that the missing person report for him was filed on Nov. 18, about two weeks before he allegedly shot and killed Thompson execution-style outside the New York Hilton Midtown hotel. The poster goes out to agencies for a missing person.

The police source tells Fox News that Mangione’s mother phoned in to file the missing person report stating she last spoke with her son around July 1 and that he worked at True Car.

The location given for a work address was 124 Montgomery, which is permanently closed and there is no phone number.

Mangione’s mother said she didn't know any other place her son would frequent in San Francisco, per the source.

The San Francisco Chronicle, citing two sources familiar with the matter, reports that police recognized the then-wanted suspect as being Mangione four days before his high-profile arrest at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He had been on the run for five days.

When Mangione was arrested Monday authorities said that he had not previously been on law enforcement’s radar. "This was not a name that was called into us," New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told NBC on Tuesday.

According to an FBI NYC source, a tip was received from the San Francisco Police Department on the possible identity of Mangione following the Dec. 4 shooting in Midtown Manhattan.

The particular tip assisted FBI NYC during their investigation and eventual arrest of the 26-year-old Ivy League graduate.

"FBI New York conducted routine investigative activity and referred this and other leads to the New York City Police Department as part of our assistance to them in their investigation," sources said. "Extensive sharing of the photos by law enforcement led to the identification by a citizen and subsequent arrest by the Altoona Police Department."

Charged in Pennsylvania with forgery and carrying a firearm without a license, he has not waived his right to an extradition hearing to face murder charges in New York.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said Friday that there are "indications" that Mangione may indeed waive his right to an extradition hearing, but that his office will be ready if he continues to contest extradition.

The 26-year-old was denied bail and will remain incarcerated at SCI Huntingdon until his attorney files a writ of habeas corpus, challenging whether he is being lawfully detained.

Police say he waited outside a hotel where UnitedHealthcare was holding its annual investor conference before sneaking up on Thompson and firing at him from close range. Video of the cold-blooded killing was captured on CCTV.

Mangione broke his silence with an outburst on Tuesday as he was escorted into a Pennsylvania courthouse, where he challenged his arrest.

"It's completely out of touch, and an insult to the intelligence of the American people and its lived experience," Mangione shouted, prompting his detail of about 10 officers to hurry him inside.

Dressed in an orange jumpsuit, Mangione appeared unfazed. He was seen whispering with his attorney, Thomas Dickey, glancing at reporters and mumbling to himself at the Blair County Court hearing.

The slaying of Thompson has gripped the nation as police believe he may have been motivated by ill will towards the health insurance industry.

Meanwhile, FOX Business has learned that Mangione was not a client of the health insurer UnitedHealthcare.

NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told WNBC-TV Thursday that the Ivy League graduates may have targeted the company because of its size and influence. He said a note was found in Mangione's possession when he was detained in Pennsylvania.

"We have no indication that he was ever a client of United Healthcare, but he does make mention that it is the fifth-largest corporation in America, which would make it the largest health care organization in America," Kenny told the news outlet. "So, that's possibly why he targeted that company. He had prior knowledge that the conference was taking place on that date at that location."

Mangione's mother was not a member of UnitedHealthcare either. Kenny noted that Mangione sustained a major back injury in July 2023.

"It seems that he had an accident that caused him to go to the emergency room back in July of 2023, and that it was a life-changing injury," said Kenny. "He posted X-rays of screws being inserted into his spine. So, the injury that he suffered was, was a life-changing, life-altering injury, and that's what may have put him on this path."

Kenny confirmed that Mangione's family reported him missing to San Francisco authorities in November.
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I'm a Silly said:
If someone already posted this, apologies, but this is the story with the missing person notice, and height is listed as 5'10" for those who are obsessed with manlet-posting, lol:
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No true American madman story is complete without the obligatory "he was already reported 85 times to authorities but no one could've predicted this!"

(Yes I know that really, really doesn't apply on this situation but still fascinating how it happens almost every single time)
 
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jje100010001 said:
The whole young fit dude + psychotic/schizoid break + questionable psychedelics use reminds me of the whole Connor Murphy saga (and he is still spiraling).
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Speculation, but I dont think it was a psychotic break. It was a psychedelic induced spiritual breakthrough. The backpain was what initially lead him to use psychedelics, but he was never irrational
 
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