A healthcare system’s moral bankruptcy goes viral

A healthcare system’s moral bankruptcy goes viral 
MedCity News; by Neal K. Shah; 12/5/24 
Brian Thompson's murder was chilling, but the social media response of this tragedy was equally shocking, if eye-opening. It shows a massive collapse of public trust in our healthcare system, a system so broken that it bankrupts families, denies life-saving care, and treats death as an acceptable cost of doing business. When UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down outside a Manhattan hotel ..., something chilling happened: thousands of Americans responded not with horror, but with dark jokes and scathing comments about the health insurance industry. People shared stories of being denied coverage by the company and drew parallels comparing the CEO’s death to the ways they’ve been mistreated by America’s healthcare system. ... The tragedy of Thompson’s death is compounded by a cruel irony: He was rushed to Mount Sinai  — a healthcare system whose hospitals UnitedHealth removed from its network only a few months ago, leaving thousands of patients scrambling. Even in death, he couldn’t escape the byzantine system his company helped create.
Editor's note, 12/9/2024, 7:00pm ET: National news is continually updating the unfolding information about the "person of interest" under arrest.