Social media users have dug up the final LinkedIn post of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the replies to which indicate how upset customers were with his company over a year before he was fatally shot by an unidentified man in Manhattan on Wednesday.
On Mar 14, 2023, the CEO had written about allegedly working to reduce healthcare costs for his customers.
"We work every day to find ways to make #healthcare more affordable, including reducing the cost of life-saving prescription drugs," he wrote. "I'm proud of the word Chief Affordability Officer Matthew Vesledahl and his team are doing to reduce costs for members," he wrote, in a response to a longwinded post of Vesledahl's linking to a UHC landing page titled "Helping make health care more affordable."
Though many of the comments have been removed from this post, X screenshots shared by @GayBearRes on Dec. 5, 2024, reveal bitter complaints from customers concerning difficulties in obtaining life-saving care.
"You are doing a great job cutting your costs," says one commenter, sarcastically. "Not having a single anesthesiologist in network in the entire state of Montana is a great policy to save you money."
Another UHC member complained that the company had repeatedly delayed decisions to authorize care for her sick mother, "compromising her health even more."
"She is ready to get better, but instead you have her lying in a hospital bed."
The late health insurance CEO appears to be finding as much sympathy on other social media platforms as he found positive responses to his last LinkedIn post. As news spread of the targeted killing, UHC members across the U.S. shared their gut-wrenching stories of coverage denials that caused suffering and death for themselves and their loved ones.
"Today was supposed to be an extremely sad day for me," wrote one grieving mother. "The news about the CEO being assassinated brightened up my day. My baby would’ve been celebrating his seventh birthday but was denied experimental ... treatment due to health insurance issues."
"My sister has stage 4 cancer," said American historian Spencer Beswick. "The amount of time and anguish caused by fighting her insurance company to pay for the treatment it is supposed to cover is unconscionable. People who get rich off of denying care to the sick and dying deserve no sympathy."
Other parents, cancer sufferers, and healthcare workers spoke on coverage denials that were occasionally downright absurd, including the time they didn't want to pay for a birth because the unborn infant hadn't been added to the parent's policy.
According to a website owned by LendingTree, UHC is the worst health insurance company when it comes to denying claims with a rate of 32 percent, taking a five-point lead over the next worst offender.
While ValuePenguin posted a notice at the top of the page saying that "one insurer" contacted them on Dec. 5, 2024, to complain about something in their data, the site states that the "rate of claim denials by a company are based on available data on claim denials and appeals from CMS public use files."
At the same time, UHC is facing a lawsuit accusing it of using AI to automatically deny claims, often delaying essential care. They were also the subject of a scathing U.S. Senate report published on Oct. 17, 2024, saying that they had denied skilled nursing services to stroke and fall patients under Medicare Advantage plans.
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