S3 E27 - Celebrating the Murder of the United Healthcare CEO

A man was murdered and people aren’t sad. A man was gunned down in the street in broad daylight, and people are saying he deserved it because of the job he did, when they should be wondering who’s next. 

A father of two is dead. He won’t be home for Christmas, and only one out of ten social media comments are asking for justice.  Because he’s white, male, and successful, people are happy he’s dead. 

New York City is a paradise for criminals, and it’s a hell for the law-abiding.  But the left is increasingly gunning down its rivals, or cheering as someone else does it for them.

Commentary on trending issues brought to you with a moderate perspective.

Transcript

The CEO of a health insurance company is murdered and the nation responds saying that's what you get for running your business efficiently. Another case of vigilante justice in America today on the Tenth Man.

A man was murdered and oddly people aren't sad and they're not angry. A man was gunned down in the street in broad daylight And people are saying he deserved it because of the job he did. When they probably should be wondering which one of us is going to be next. But in the crazy landscape of New York City law enforcement, where we're used to seeing Asians getting beat up by random thugs, good Samaritans like Daniel Penny being locked up and [00:01:00] put on trial for stopping a would be killer, and prosecutors and lawmakers collaborating to create new laws designed just for the purpose of putting a former president, President Trump, on trial.

But the murder of Brian Thompson is different because this time, the crimes against him are not treated with mere indifference, but with glee. We should all be worried, all of us, about where this is going.

Because you can't be happy someone died, no matter who it is. George Floyd. He was a bum and a thug, not a hero. But no one's happy that he died in police custody.

Jordan Neely, the proximate cause for Daniel Penney's being on trial. He was another bum and a criminal. And Penney should not be on trial for his so [00:02:00] called murder or manslaughter. And even though the world is probably better off without Jordan Neely, he hasn't done anything good for anyone in decades.

Well, a decade, still. And that's just

objectively speaking. But No one's happy that Neely died, but when it comes to Brian Thompson, yes, people are rejoicing. They're rejoicing that he was shot, They're rejoicing because he was the CEO of United Healthcare.

But that's jumping to the conclusion that his killing was ideological, when there's no evidence, at least there's no conclusion as to the motive. So without any conclusion, without any motive, people are saying, well it's okay because his company killed millions.

Look at the commentary on social media, you might be [00:03:00] stunned. Nine out of ten commenters say that he deserved it. And where did they get the number? He killed millions of people. A very ironic accusation, since his company is a provider or an insurer of health care.

And violent responses nowadays are becoming quite common, especially from the left. Congressman Maxine Waters and President Joe Biden both urged attacks on their political rivals, or urged and or allowed for, And then people complied by storming the homes of Supreme Court justices and, and by accosting congressmen on the streets of New York when they were just trying to have dinner

and we all remember the people proclaiming loudly in social media that it was a shame that the shooter who targeted President Trump at Butler, Pennsylvania It was a shame that he [00:04:00] missed. Isn't it funny how the party of gun control is always the first one to resort to violence? In fact, originally, this was going to be a gun control episode.

People from both sides of the political spectrum often complain about these big companies. I always say these big companies with air quotes because that's a very common phrase.

This episode, in fact, may offend most people. I hope you're one of the few that it does not. But the thing is, that's the job of the 10th man. It's your responsibility to speak up when others are saying the wrong thing. There are people who think they are doing this, but it's not ever going to be someone like an Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Because AOC, Alexandria Occasional Cortex, thinks she's speaking truth to [00:05:00] power when she's actually just a social media influencer, and the irony is noted, a social media influencer with millions of followers who give her check marks when she says things that they like. But the Tenth Man has to be someone who's unafraid to speak up, even when it's against his own side.

And there are people who use the "these big companies" argument on both sides. When it's the left, they complain about big oil, and they do this despite the fact , big oil makes money one year, they lose billions another year, but they only complain when they make money. And then the right complains about big pharma making millions off of the COVID vaccine.

Big Pharma didn't create COVID, and they're supposed to make money when they sell vaccines, [00:06:00] so there's no harm there. .

And both sides, at least in my opinion, complain about these big insurance companies. UnitedHealthcare is being criticized for pushing back against claims, but that's their job. If insurance companies gave in to every single claim, they'd go broke. So, somebody has to push back and that's their job, like it or not.

Well, you should like it, you should expect it, because if they didn't push back against unreasonable claims, then You wouldn't be able to afford the insurance or the health care would not be available because the unreasonable claim people were using it all up. So someone has to push back against, for example, the nonsense of people going to the emergency room for things that are not emergencies.

This is one of the things that UnitedHealthcare did. Someone should push back against Americans who complain about the price of [00:07:00] pills and yet. Every year the police department has to have a pill roundup where you can dispose of your unused drugs in order to avoid flushing them down the toilet so they don't poison the fish.

Right, they're so expensive that you can flush them down the toilet or throw them away with the police. They need to push back against people who won't see a nurse practitioner or a physician assistant and not a doctor when that's all that's needed. And remember that insurance companies are dealing with our fellow consumers who Think they're going to get healthier by purchasing a juicer because they think that pre chewing their food in a machine is going to somehow make them healthy or by mixing beet powder into their food and calling everything a super food.

You might as well be an Asian warlord taking ground up rhinoceros horn in order to fix your ED as do some of the things that [00:08:00] we in modern Western cultures do. And particularly in America, we have some high medical bills, but we also have the highest rate of joint replacement in the world.

And why is that? Well, it's because people are living so long that they are wearing out their natural joints, so where's the problem? And our biggest concern here seems to be the price, not of cancer drugs, but of insulin and ozempic, because all of us are overweight..

And being overweight, that's another reason the joints are wearing out. So everybody in general is in favor of common sense and controlling costs, but it seems most of us forget that when it comes to health care. And the argument of these big companies is just wrong on the surface. This [00:09:00] whole idea, it's as simple as this. No harm, no foul. It's simple. Or maybe, no gain, no foul. How do you tell who's cheating in a race? Well, it's not the guy who lost, it's the guy who won. You don't get the loser and test him for doping. So, we translate that to healthcare companies as follows.

If they are doing something wrong to increase profits because they're obsessed with profits, then there should be some evidence of that. And merely saying they made 200 billion dollars last year in your best voice of outrage, that's not evidence. Any argument you want to make about these big companies can be answered or responded to by a quick look at their balance sheet.

In fact, in the [00:10:00] states, look at your own 401k or your IRA.

Are you making a ton of money? If you're not, why don't you put all your money into UnitedHealthcare because they're making excess profits. Or maybe it's already in there. Go look. See how much your paid investors, your paid advisors, are putting into UnitedHealthcare , because it's a gold mine, right?

No. Look and see, are people dumping their other stocks to buy UnitedHealthcare? All the people that are making the videos, the TikToks, saying how much money they're making? What's UnitedHealthcare's price to earnings ratio? Its dividends percentage. Its earnings per share. The numbers don't lie. And all of these numbers for UnitedHealthcare, they're all average or below.

UnitedHealthcare is not cheating people for the sake of excess profits, if you do the math. [00:11:00] People are talking about how huge this company is, and it is big. I'd imagine it's big because it's successful. Kind of like General Motors used to be. Kind of like Toyota is now. Or some even bigger Chinese companies.

And since most of these arguments are coming from the left, If bigger isn't better, then what do you think happens when you move to a single payer system, like they supposedly have in the other countries? No competition, a limited number of providers, of doctors, the care gets rationed. It gets rationed everywhere.

A little fun sidebar, I like a lot of foreign TV shows. One of the better ones is called Bess of Both Worlds. Bess as in Bess Truman. Bess of Both Worlds comes out of Australia. You can see it now on, Netflix, .And, uh, they've changed the name for it .

[00:12:00] For some reason they thought Bess of Both Worlds wasn't explanatory, was gonna confuse the Americans, so they changed the name here to Upper Middle Bogan. A bogan is what they call a redneck in Australia. As far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong. So they changed the name to Upper Middle Bogan because that's going to be more clear to us Americans looking for it on our streaming providers.

But if you turn on this show, you'll find that in the very first episode, the very first episode, there's controversy over the medical care received by the rich versus the middle class or the middle class versus the poor. And it also happens in later on in at least two other episodes. And it'd be interesting if we had more TV shows available in the United States from other countries.

But it would have to be English speaking countries mostly speaking. And I've seen this in other shows too. There's one English show, but I cannot remember the name of it, but you see the same thing. [00:13:00] Healthcare is rationed everywhere, so it's an excellent show. And even apart from the ironic references to healthcare, hope you go check it out and enjoy it.

 Not only do we have the irony of people who want single payer health care Complaining about the size of United Health Care. I also wonder Wasn't Obamacare supposed to fix all the problems you see we have more government involvement in health care than ever before now We have more people on Medicaid.

We've had expansion of Medicare But we'll save healthcare debate in general for another episode. Just like we'll save the gun control debate for another episode. That's how this episode started, you know. Talking about a man murdered in broad daylight in a gun free zone. But we got diverted once we looked into it and found everybody rejoicing that he was dead.

So that's why we're [00:14:00] here. But here's the strangest thing about this story and the reaction to it. As of now, December 9th. The police have established no motive for the shooting. All this talk about his being shot because of his job is pure speculation. Now much of it is based on the words deny, depose, defend, which were written on the shell casings.

Some clarification, it's my understanding that one word was written on each shell casing so it was not in any particular order. And I'm saying that because the words are always listed in that order, deny, depose, defend. But the title of the book, which it's supposedly taken from, is Delay, Deny, Defend.

It's the wrong words, one of the words is wrong, and one of the words is missing. And the other two words are out of [00:15:00] order, but the order doesn't really matter because it's on individual casings.

Well, assassin's notes are always suspicious. So you'd think that he would have written the title correctly, just to make sure people believed that it was a legitimate assassination. 

And that book, Delayed Denied Offend is subtitled Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It. Presumably their advice on what to do about it is not to go shoot somebody.

Now, we don't want to speculate any more. Or to any more degree of fault than anyone else. But if a woman were killed, they would immediately start investigating the husband. And that may be being done in this case. Thompson was married, although he and his wife have been living in separate houses for years.

There's no evidence there's anyone seeking a [00:16:00] divorce. But look at the preparation here. This man was killed not at home where he had habits and a regular path of travel. The shooter waited until he was in New York City at a convention, as if to make the point, the false point perhaps, that he was being killed, that he was being assassinated because of his role.

But it was a hard thing to do. The killer had to know exactly where the victim was, and where he was going, and he had to know all this in enough detail to plan his own approach in order to plan the attack. and to plan his escape. This amount of detail has led some to believe that Thompson himself planned his own execution for insurance purposes, perhaps.

Or it could be something else, like a love triangle.

But even if he was attacked for ideological reasons, that doesn't [00:17:00] mean we should somehow give credence to the assassin's cause. I mean, we don't have a lot of Lee Harvey Oswald supporters out there, do we?

Eventually we will learn whether this was a crazed attention seeker who just settled on Thompson as a convenient target, Or whether it was an intelligent, crafty individual, the third apex of a love triangle who cleverly plotted a murder to look like an assassination. Decide for yourself, or better off, don't decide, and just see what happens.

But at this point, those two options are equally likely. And all the people who are gloating over Thompson's death, they're doing so for no reason, or for the wrong reason. Eventually this murder will appear on TV as the plot for one of the television lawyers. They'll have to wait until they have a motive for the killer, but I'm sure [00:18:00] Hollywood hopes that the case proves to be one of pure ideological motivation. One of an idealistic crusader striking out against the man.

They like white businessman villains, but whether that's true, Or it turns out to be the more likely case of either a jealous lover or a simple maniac. All we can hope is that society remembers that murder is murder, and murder is always wrong. Th