New York (CNN) — After police found the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” printed on shell casings near the site where UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down, merchandise bearing those words started to appear online.
The phrase might be linked to a 2010 book critiquing the health insurance industry titled, “Delay Deny Defend,” a common description of the industry’s tactics. Those words appeared on a number of items on Amazon’s store, including hats, T-shirts and pint glasses.
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The suspect in the case has garnered sympathy and online fandom partly because of people’s problems with the health insurance industry. The majority of insured US adults had at least one issue, including denial of claims, with their health insurance in the span of a year, according to a survey released in June 2023 by KFF, a nonprofit health policy research group.
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Amazon has pulled the merchandise from the website for violating the company’s rules, according to a person familiar with Amazon’s decision making. It’s unclear how many people bought items emblazoned with the phrase.
However, “deny, defend, depose” merchandise remains on sale on eBay. The phrase itself doesn’t violate its rules, but “items that glorify or incite violence, including those that celebrate the recent murder of UHC CEO Brian Thompson, are prohibited,” a company spokesperson told CNN.
Police on Monday arrested Luigi Mangione, the suspect in Thompson’s killing. A police official told CNN that Mangione possessed a handwritten document stating, “these parasites had it coming,” and expressing “ill will toward corporate America.”
Mangione was spotted at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and a McDonald’s employee called the police. The restaurant’s page on Google and Yelp has since been flooded with negative reviews, calling workers “rats” and “snitches.”
One now-deleted review on Google that was spotted by Reuters said the “location has rats in the kitchen that will make you sick and your insurance isn’t going to cover it.” Commenters continue to add negative reviews to the McDonald’s location’s profile page. Google didn’t immediately respond to comment.
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Commenters also shared a similar sentiment on Yelp, however Yelp turned off commenting on the McDonald’s location’s 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,” according to a pop-up on Yelp.
The killing has generated mixed feelings online. In a Facebook post by UnitedHealth Group expressing sadness about UnitedHealthcare CEO 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.
“Limitations on access to care due to claims denials have absolutely been a source of frustration for a long time,” said Kaye Pestaina, KFF’s director of Program on Patient and Consumer Protections.
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