CNN - Killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO prompts flurry of stories on social media over denied insurance claims

By Tami Luhby and Clare Duffy, CNN

Updated 7:46 AM EST, Fri December 6, 2024



New York CNN — The early morning killing of a top health insurance executive in midtown Manhattan Wednesday has unleashed a flurry of rage and frustration from social media users over denials of their medical claims, a public display of Americans’ pent-up anger at the nation’s complex health insurance industry.

In one stark example, a Facebook post by UnitedHealth Group expressing sadness about UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s death received 62,000 reactions – 57,000 of them laughing emojis. UnitedHealth Group is the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, the division that Thompson ran.

/snip/

Social media backlash
Almost immediately after news broke that Thompson had been killed, social media users began posting about their frustrations with UnitedHealthcare and other insurance companies.

UnitedHealthcare “denied my surgery two days before it was scheduled. I was in the hospital finance office in tears (when I was supposed to be at the hospital doing pre-op stuff),” one user wrote in an X post that received more than 70,000 likes. “My mother was flying out to see me. My surgeon spent a day and a half pleading my case to United when she probably should have been taking care of her other patients,” she added, before saying the surgery ended up going ahead but calling the process “torture.”

“My breast cancer surgery was denied” by a different insurance company, another X user posted. “Breast cancer. She asked me ‘well, is it an emergency?’ I don’t know- it’s (f***ing) cancer. What do you think? I had to appeal and luckily it went through. Evil to do that to people,” she said.

/snip/

“This is care that people’s doctors recommend for them, and some of this care can be frightening,” Sara Collins, senior scholar at The Commonwealth Fund, a health policy foundation, told CNN, giving a cancer diagnosis as an example. “To get any kind of denial or delay while your insurer figures out whether or not they’re going to cover it is frightening for people. To have a decision all of a sudden be being made on the basis of financing is terribly upsetting for families.”

/snip