New York (CNN) — After police discovered the phrases “deny,” “defend” and “depose” printed on shell casings close to the positioning the place UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down, merchandise bearing these phrases began to seem on-line.
The phrase could be linked to a 2010 e-book critiquing the medical insurance trade titled, “Delay Deny Defend,” a typical description of the trade’s ways. These phrases appeared on quite a lot of gadgets on Amazon’s retailer, together with hats, T-shirts and pint glasses.
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The suspect within the case has garnered sympathy and on-line fandom partly due to individuals’s issues with the medical insurance trade. Nearly all of insured US adults had a minimum of one challenge, together with denial of claims, with their medical insurance within the span of a yr, in keeping with a survey launched in June 2023 by KFF, a nonprofit well being coverage analysis group.
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Amazon has pulled the merchandise from the web site for violating the corporate’s guidelines, in keeping with an individual aware of Amazon’s determination making. It’s unclear how many individuals purchased gadgets emblazoned with the phrase.
Nevertheless, “deny, defend, depose” merchandise stays on sale on eBay. The phrase itself doesn’t violate its guidelines, however “items that glorify or incite violence, including those that celebrate the recent murder of UHC CEO Brian Thompson, are prohibited,” an organization spokesperson advised CNN.
Police on Monday arrested Luigi Mangione, the suspect in Thompson’s killing. A police official advised CNN that Mangione possessed a handwritten doc stating, “these parasites had it coming,” and expressing “ill will toward corporate America.”
Mangione was noticed at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and a McDonald’s worker referred to as the police. The restaurant’s web page on Google and Yelp has since been flooded with unfavorable critiques, calling employees “rats” and “snitches.”
One now-deleted assessment on Google that was noticed by Reuters mentioned the “location has rats in the kitchen that will make you sick and your insurance isn’t going to cover it.” Commenters proceed so as to add unfavorable critiques to the McDonald’s location’s profile web page. Google didn’t instantly reply to remark.
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Commenters additionally shared an analogous sentiment on Yelp, nonetheless Yelp turned off commenting on the McDonald’s location’s web page.
“While we don’t take a stand one way or the other when it comes to this incident, we’ve temporarily disabled the posting of content to this page as we work to investigate whether the content you see here reflects actual consumer experiences rather than the recent events,” in keeping with a pop-up on Yelp.
The killing has generated blended emotions on-line. In a Fb put up by UnitedHealth Group expressing disappointment about UnitedHealthcare CEO Thompson’s dying obtained 62,000 reactions – 57,000 of them laughing emojis. UnitedHealth Group is the guardian firm of UnitedHealthcare, the division that Thompson ran.
“Limitations on access to care due to claims denials have absolutely been a source of frustration for a long time,” mentioned Kaye Pestaina, KFF’s director of Program on Affected person and Client Protections.
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