Elizabeth Warren on UnitedHealthcare CEO assassination: ‘People can only be pushed so far’

Flint McColgan, Boston HeraldBoston Herald

Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said “people can only be pushed so far” in an interview in which she condemned the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

“The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the health care system,” Warren told the HuffPost in an interview.

“Violence is never the answer,” Warren said. “But people can only be pushed so far.”

Warren had been asked about how many people had seemed to applaud Thompson’s broad-daylight execution in Manhattan a week ago due to his representation of a “vile” health insurance business practices.

Some observers did not appreciate Warren qualifying her condemnation of the murder with commentary on the insurance industry, which she has long lambasted and worked to regulate.

“This statement invents a non-existent connection between the insane murderer and United Healthcare, which did not push this rich kid to do anything, even accidentally. He went crazy and killed someone,” Billy Gribbin, Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s communication director, wrote in response to Warren’s comments in a tweet HuffPost linked to in the story.

Warren, according to the HuffPost piece, followed up on Wednesday with a new statement on the matter.

“Violence is never the answer. Period,” the senator said. “I should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder.”

Fellow New England progressive and critic of the industry, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, made similar comments, accompanying his condemnation of Thompson’s murder while also seeming to find reason in the violent sentiments against the insurance industry.

“I think what the outpouring of anger at the health care industry tells us is that millions of people understand that health care is a human right and that you cannot have people in the insurance industry rejecting needed health care for people while they make billions of dollars in profit,” Sanders said.

Thompson, 50, was killed on Dec. 4 as he walked alone to a hotel, where UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, UnitedHealth Group, was holding its annual investor conference, police said.

Luigi Nicholas Mangione, 26, of Maryland, was arrested Monday for Thompson’s murder after a McDonald’s customer in Altoona, Pennsylvania, recognized him from a surveillance photo. He was formally charged with the murder by Manhattan prosecutors later that day.

“Our family is shocked and devastated by Luigi’s arrest,” Mangione’s family said in a statement posted on social media late Monday by his cousin, Maryland lawmaker Nino Mangione. “We offer our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson and we ask people to pray for all involved.”

Mangione grew up in a prominent real estate family in the Baltimore area, according to the Associate Press. He attended an elite Baltimore prep school, graduating as valedictorian in 2016, according to the school’s website. He went on to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science in 2020 from the University of Pennsylvania, a spokesperson for the Ivy League school said.