Free Luigi!

 

Jeffrey St. Clair>>

+ This x-ray may explain why Luigi Mangione shot Brian Thompson in the back…

  

+ Sen. Elizabeth Warren: “Violence is never the answer…but you can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands…What happens when you turn this into the billionaires run it all is they get the opportunity to squeeze every last penny.”

+ In a message to company employees, Andrew Witty, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, praised Brian Thompson for his persistent efforts to halt “unnecessary health care.”

+ A piece in Pro Publica covered a lawsuit brought by a patient suffering from ulcerative colitis, a chronic, debilitating disease, who UHC denied care. The lawsuit cited recorded phone calls in which UHC employees joked and laughed about the denied claims and ridiculed the patient’s urgent pleas for treatment as “tantrums.”

+ Cory Doctorow: “I don’t want people to kill insurance executives, and I don’t want insurance executives to kill people. But I am unsurprised that this happened. Indeed, I’m surprised that it took so long.”

+ TV news reports from outside the jail where Mangione is being held were interrupted Wednesday evening by inmates shouting: “Free Luigi! Free Luigi!”

+ Just to be clear: Brian Thompson was paid more than $10 million last year and was being sued by the Hollywood Firefighters Pension Fund, which was an institutional investor in UnitedHealthcare, for insider trading after dumping $15 million in company stock when he learned that UnitedHealth was the subject of a Justice Department probe, information that was kept secret from other investors.

+ A new Pro Publica report, largely based on leaked documents, suggest that UnitedHealthcare is “strategically limiting After reviewing leaked documents, we have found UnitedHealth is strategically limiting access to a treatment for thousands of children with autism across the country in order to cut costs.” Dan Unumb, an attorney and president of the Autism Legal Resource Center: “Yes, this therapy can be expensive. But solving the problem by denying kids access to medically necessary care is a terrible solution.”