KEPW Reporters Roundtable looks at assassination of health care executive

Presenter: The KEPW Reporters Roundtable Dec. 5 looks at the assassination of a top health care executive. At a press conference Wednesday, New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch:

Jessica Tisch (New York City, police commissioner): Good morning, everyone. In Midtown Manhattan early this morning, 50-year-old Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed in what appears at this early stage of our investigation to be a brazen targeted attack. This does not appear to be a random act of violence.

[00:00:31] The victim was in New York City to speak at an investor conference. It appears the suspect was lying in wait for several minutes. And as the victim was walking to the conference hotel, the suspect approached from behind and fired several rounds, striking the victim at least once in the back and at least once in the right calf.

[00:00:51] Presenter: Speaking with Tom Peck at the Reporters’ Roundtable Dec. 5, Todd Boyle:

[00:00:56] Todd Boyle: Did you have any thoughts on Brian Thompson’s murder? Apparently the hatred of the health insurance industry is more widespread than is commonly reported anywhere. But these are just total exploiters. They get between the health care providers and the patients and the doctors and everybody hates them and the patients hate them.

[00:01:18] Presenter: Tom Peck.

[00:01:18] Tom Peck: He was from UnitedHealth Group. It’s the largest insurance company in the world. And they do it by buying everything up and they’re in Oregon, and they’re operating under Optum. They bought OMG (Oregon Medical Group). They bought Corvallis Clinics, and they’re going after everything. And they have another wing which is the billing section of the UnitedHealth. And they had a breach and they shut it down. It was a ransomware. They shut it down for a month and what that did is, all the small health care providers couldn’t bill and it bankrupted them so they could buy them.

[00:02:03] Presenter: The New Republic wrote, “As Americans have fewer and fewer lawful means to peacefully address social and economic issues or resolve disputes among themselves, targeted killings like this may only become more common.” Todd Boyle:

[00:02:17] Todd Boyle: When occasionally the institutions in New York and Washington suffer a setback, I actually don’t shed a tear. Honestly, you know, I didn’t like shed a tear over Brian Thompson.

[00:02:31] Tom Peck: You should read the Washington Post editorials about the assassination. Most people say… he killed hundreds of thousands of people.

[00:02:40] Presenter: Sam Broadway:

[00:02:40] Sam Broadway (KEPW Newsday): There’s many that are calling the shooter a hero. So, you might be in company with those folks there because there are a lot of people upset about the health care and how it’s going.

[00:02:55] Presenter: Tom Peck asked for volunteer help with the second citywide health care forum.

[00:02:59] Tom Peck: The Eugene Health Care Coalition is holding a meeting on Monday the 16th at 9 a.m. at IHOP out on (West) 11th, and we’re planning the next second citywide forum. And so we’ve got a steering committee, but we’re trying to get more people involved because it’s a big undertaking. So Monday the 16th at 9 a.m. at IHOP.

[00:03:28] We’re going to put some money behind marketing. We want to have a robust advertising budget. We want people in Lane County, which goes out to the coast and all around to attend this thing. We want to put a lot of money into news, you know, flyers, like we did with wildfire, you know, signs, yard signs, leave no stone unturned. And so, that’s our plan.

[00:04:00] And I think our health care coalition doing a series of these, we’ll get some good recognition and ultimately we would like a seat at the table about the development and the controls of health care in Eugene, Lane County, and in Oregon.

[00:04:22] Cedric: Tom Peck said he is already lining up the speakers for the second citywide health care forum, scheduled for March 1.

[00:04:30] Tom Peck: We’ll probably have (U.S. Sen.) Ron Wyden, (Oregon Majority Leader Rep.) Ben Bowman. We’re going to probably have a guy, I don’t know if you know Hayden Rooke-Ley, he will probably be the last speaker at our forums and he’s got his JD and he’s super smart. He’s an advisor to Ben Bowman on that legislation to curb corporate takeover of the exam room, you know, hospitals, corporate executives are through rules, really able to determine the health care.

[00:05:09] Presenter: Here is Hayden Rooke-Ley speaking before a legislative committee in September, 2023.

[00:05:15] Hayden Rooke-Ley (Senate interim committee on health care, Sept. 27, 2023): I’m Hayden Rooke-Ley. I’m a lawyer from Eugene, and I’m really excited to be here to be talking about the prohibition on the Corporate Practice Of Medicine (CPOM) doctrine. This is something that I recently wrote about in the New England Journal of Medicine.

[00:05:27] So, what is the Corporate Practice of Medicine doctrine? This is a state-based doctrine that essentially forbids or prohibits corporations from engaging in the practice of medicine. More specifically, it bans corporations from owning or controlling medical practices or from employing physicians.

[00:05:49] It’s a doctrine that actually has deep historical roots dating back to the 1800s, and it arises out of a pretty basic and intuitive concern, which is that we want licensed and trained medical providers making medical decisions.

[00:06:03] We want them as the sort of captain of the ship in the exam room, and as part of medical practices, and we don’t necessarily want corporations serving that role. Importantly, you know, this doctrine has long recognized that, licensed trained medical providers have certain ethical and professional obligations as licensed medical providers that again, corporations don’t have.

[00:06:26] So you might ask if the Corporate Practice of Medicine Doctrine exists, if there’s a ban on corporations from practicing medicine, how does that comport with Amazon coming into our state as medical providers? Optum—owners of big physician practices across the state, including in my hometown in Oregon. We’re also seeing quite a high level of investment from Walgreens, another national retailer that’s moving quickly into the health care sector.

[00:06:49] And at least in part, this dates back to an erosion we’ve seen of the ban on the Corporate Practice of Medicine, which dates back to the ’70s and ’80s. This coincided with the rise of managed care and sort of the HMO revolution and this general push towards the corporatization of health care.

[00:07:05] We’ve seen essentially three different ways that the doctrine has been weakened. The first is through relaxing requirements on physician ownership… The second is just express exemptions for certain types of providers… And then the third has to do with essentially ways that private entities and corporations have figured out how to sort of contract around or circumvent or undermine the spirit of CPOM through sophisticated contracting. …

[00:07:31] So what do we see in Oregon today? The sorts of erosion of the doctrine that I just referred to, across these kind of three different ways where CPOM bans have been weakened a bit.

[00:07:42] Presenter: That’s Hayden Rooke-Ley from Eugene, speaking at the legislature in September 2023. His team has since published another paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. Tom Peck hopes that Hayden will contribute to the second citywide health care forum. Here is Tom speaking in November.

[00:08:00] Tom Peck: The organization that I’m in is Eugene Health Care Coalition, which we formed after the closure of the University Health District Hospital, the ED, it was a coalition of Oregon Nurses Association, other unions and organizations, certainly Health Care for All, and individuals like myself who are very concerned.

[00:08:28] So we’ve been meeting since then. We have four neighborhood associations who are meeting and I’m now the liaison to the NLC from Friendly Area Neighborhood.

[00:08:43] Presenter: Contact Tom at the Friendly Area Neighbors, Neighborhood Leaders Council, or join him at IHOP. Todd Boyle identified another need for volunteers in the community.

[00:08:53] Todd Boyle: So, I’m willing to throw down hours for this. You know, this is something that is vitally important for every community.

[00:08:59] The smaller organizations, they tend to just be promoting their own stuff.  But now Instagram recently, and this is the universal law, all the social media platforms, they don’t let you organize your feed in chronological order anymore. So what this means is that they’re going to stuff three or four things or eight things, in front of the latest thing that they posted

[00:09:23] They really want you to just stay on the platform and wade through all the stuff that they want you to read and then they’re going to show the latest thing from Jewish Voice for Peace and for the university’s protest and so you know it becomes uneconomic to use Instagram as a means of distributing event announcements.

[00:09:41] Presenter: With final thoughts, the dean of KEPW News, Sam Broadway.

[00:09:45] Sam Broadway (KEPW Newsday): Blue Cross Blue Shield Anthem decided this week that they would not cover anesthesia if the surgery exceeded its time. So, if you were getting anesthesia during a surgery, there was a cutoff. And, yeah, that’s what they decided, they were going to do this but because of how unpopular a decision like that is, they decided to reverse that decision and so, you could be under anesthesia for as long as you need to, for right now.

[00:10:24] But you know, this is the face of the new administration and the new way things will be going down. And there’s a lot of things with this new administration that we need to be aware of, including internment camps for the homeless. Hooray! Yeah, that’s a big winner. And that’s what they want to do. Not just move millions of immigrants out of here, but put people in internment camps. And my question is: What if you refused to go?

[00:10:57] It’s also of note to know that, of course, this administration incoming will be cutting Medicare expansion for a lot of people, especially in nine states, mainly on the East Coast, but Arizona is one of them.

[00:11:12] And what gets me is California Gov. Gavin Newsom has made an effort to ‘Trump-proof’ California so that they can’t be affected by these horrible policies. And I don’t see (Oregon Gov.) Tina Kotek doing that.

[00:11:29] Presenter: The KEPW Reporters Roundtable, with instant reaction to the public daylight assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

UPDATED (Dec. 9, 2024): Added 40 seconds near [3:00] in response to a request from a participating KEPW News reporter.