Manhattan Medicare Murder Mystery
“It wasn’t me. I didn’t kill him,” said Rita Baker, 88, when I told her I was calling about the Wednesday morning murder of Brian Thompson, the 50-year-old chief executive of American health care juggernaut UnitedHealthcare, by a masked assassin who shot the millionaire Minnesotan three times across the street from his Manhattan hotel, then escaped down an alley and disappeared into Central Park on a Citigroup-branded e-bike. Added Baker, “I mean, I can’t even ride a bicycle.”
I was calling Baker, who asked me to use her confirmation name in lieu of her given one due to her being “terrified” of the half-trillion-dollar insurance giant, because she’d contacted me earlier in the year to rant about the Medicare Advantage plan in which her late husband’s employer had coaxed her into enrolling, reluctantly, a year earlier. Thompson had spent most of his 20 years at UnitedHealth running its Medicare business, the cash cow around which much of the far-flung health care colossus essentially revolves. In recent weeks, his wife told NBC News, he’d received “threats” from unidentified foes who perhaps suffered from “I don’t know, a lack of coverage?”
https://prospect.org/health/2024-12-05-manhattan-medicare-murder-mystery/