By: Martin Merritt, esq.
Past President, Texas Health Lawyers Association
Past Chair, DBA Health Law Section
martin@martinmerritt.com
“Please Tell Me you Didn’t. . . How to Keep Clients Out of the Jailhouse, Poorhouse and Lawyers Out of the Nuthouse” -Blog
“Deny,” “Defend” and “Depose”
–Words scribbled by the hitman on three shell casings
Oxford, Mississippi. The Ole Miss Law School boasts 2 ½ graduates in descending order of importance: New York Times best-selling author John Grisham, my daughter, who is half-way to earning her juris doctorate, which is one reason I work so hard, and then there’s me. I just write about stuff.
While visiting my daughter last fall, I marveled at the glass book case in the Ole Miss law library. I didn’t realize John Grisham had written 74 books. These include 47 bestselling thrillers, including The Firm, which launched Tom Cruise’s career as an action star in 1993.
As with most John Grisham thrillers, The Firm is a tale of a seedy underworld, corporate greed, computer hacking, along with billing irregularities which were uncovered by Tom Cruise’s hacking of company computers, a hit man, and the Department of Justice, all of whom engage in a protracted cat-and-mouse chase through and beyond South Florida.
A work of pure fiction, The Firm is heart-pounding fun. At least it is supposed to be fiction.
Then, yesterday morning the story broke about the Death of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare. UHC is the nation’s largest health insurance company. Thomson was gunned down on the streets of Manhattan by a hitman. This is enough of a “holy crap” moment, but then even more details emerged which make me wonder if the plot in The Firm has sprung to life?
According to news reports, a masked hitman appears to have targeted Thompson in a premeditated attack. One of the only clues to the motive are three bullet casings with the cryptic words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” scribbled on them.
This is a corruption (intentional or not), of the more common phrase, “Deny, Delay, Defend,” which is also the title of a 2010 book by Jay Feinman, subtitled, Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.
Speculation immediately focused on reports that UHC has a health care claims denial rate twice the national average, and twice that of its most comparable competitor, Blue Cross Blue Shield. Could it have been a disgruntled patient or family member? Or, is that what the hitman wants us to think?
Thompson was being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice at the time of his murder and was possibly set to testify before Congress. But the plot gets even thicker, as word emerged of a class action lawsuit which accuses Thompson and three other UHC Group executives of insider trading. Allegedly, “the UnitedHealth insiders sold more than $120 million of their personally held UnitedHealth shares,” according to a suit filed by the City of Hollywood Firefighters’ Pension Fund.
At least the pension fund involvement is not unusual. (I think.) Firefighters and other public pension funds are often big investors in insurance stock, that’s how pensions meet obligations (which is one of the reasons insurance companies seem to be allowed to get away with things mere mortals cannot). When things go badly, pension funds are often plaintiffs in shareholder suits, which usually allege the actions of executives caused the price of a pension’s stock to decline.
What is unusual in the case of Thompson, is that he is accused of using insider knowledge to sell his personal UHC stock, which sharply declined after news broke of a DOJ investigation into a computer hacking event, which erased $25 billion in shareholder value. Could that be a motive?
The DOJ has also been investigating UHC to determine if it was operating a monopoly in violation of federal law in certain acquisitions of competing businesses. This lawsuit was joined in a lawsuit by the attorneys general of Maryland, Illinois, New Jersey and New York. Apparently, from what I have been able to read online, all of the UHC investigations may be frustrated by the death of Thompson.
Meanwhile, the hitman is still at large, possibly on the run in Florida. Taking into account the murder, victims of corporate greed, corruption, computer hacking, secret DOJ investigations, hitmen, chases through South Florida; these are all eerily similar to the plot of The Firm, which isn’t supposed to be real.