The Morning News

It is said of NYC that it is the city that never sleeps. The city might never sleep, meaning there's always someone up, but people do go to sleep. And upon waking up on Wednesday the morning news wasn't only about the Gowanus Parkway merge into the BQE, or the wait at the George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, but that the CEO of United Health Care, Brian Thompson,  had been gunned down at 6:44 A.M. and killed in front of the New York Hilton on 54th Street and Sixth Avenue while entering the hotel for an investors' meeting

Historically, New York City has seen its share of Mob rub outs in public places, but not for a good while now. The '70s saw so many hits that you had to wonder who was left still breathing in organized crime. There certainly were openings at the top.

You have to go back a long way to remember the rub out of Albert Anastasia in a barber's chair in the Park Sheraton Hotel in 1957, not far from the Midtown Hilton. What a mess.

It's a city that never sleeps, and a city that is always under surveillance. There is grainy camera footage of the gunman pointing his handgun at the back of Mr. Thompson, leaving him crumbled in from of the New York Hilton.

Supposedly the gun jammed, but the gunman unjammed it and kept shooting. Shell casings recovered from the scene had the words, "Delay,  "Deny" and "Defend", the title of a 2010 book by Jay M. Feinman about the practice within the healthcare industry of denying coverage of claims in order to increase corporate profits.

United Healthcare is the largest health insurer in the nation, also one that has run afoul of the law even before Mr. Thompson. One of his predecessors, CEO Dr. William McGuire, a pulmonologist, was brought down by a scandal involving repricing the company's stock options. It was big news then, and there was similar stock manipulation news on Mr. Thompson's horizon.  There seems to be a bit of corporate culture there.

On the heels of this shooting of a healthcare executive, I heard a news story on Friday morning that Anthem BlueCross and BlueShield was abandoning their plans to make patients pay for the anesthesia time that runs past the cook book expected time. The policy was due to go into effect in February 2025, but apparently someone thought twice about it with a crumpled CEO corpse laying in front of a NYC Midtown hotel. 

Anesthesia reimbursement is based on the elapsed time of the procedure, stated in 15 minute units. One hour is 4 units. Added to the units is a Basic Anesthesia Value (BAV). The two numbers are added together and multiplied by a dollar coefficient to determine the reimbursement.

A lot of health care policies hold the patient harmless for any gap in the reimbursement and the total charge. Anthem's plan was to not hold the patient harmless regardless of coverage when the elapsed time went past the anticipated elapsed time.

Thus, if your open heart surgery drifts past the expected elapsed time because of a stubborn blood vessel, then the patient is on the hook for the unreimbursed time. As if you have a chance to pop up and tell the surgeons to stop, or hurry up because this is going to cost them money than they have. Ridiculous. Who thinks of these things? 

At this writing, Wednesday's gunman is still at large, and assumed to have taken a bus back out of the city from the George Washington Bridge bus terminal. The gunman has been traced to getting off a bus originating in Atlanta that made 6-7 stops along the East Coast before getting to New York. The news has been unfolding like a Netflix miniseries release.

The City never sleeps, and it never stops taking images of all that goes on. In the surveillance photo of the shooting, and the gunman's movements before the shooting, he is always wearing a face covering, except the above photo taken when he checked into an Upper West Side hostel days before the shooting.

In that photo it was revealed he pulled the face covering down when the female clerk at the hostel asked to see his face because he was flirting with her. It's going to be interesting if that exposure is going to be key to brining him down.

Anyone who watches enough old movies will remember the Teutonic accented safe cracker, Doc, played by Sam Jaffe who is caught because he stopped too long to star at Marilyn Monroe in the 1950 movie 'Asphalt Jungle.' Undone by pretty face.

The gunman is seen in surveillance footage leaving the scene of the crime on what is reported to be an e-bike, making for Central Park, emerging on the  West Side and taking a cab to the George Washington Bridge bus station and taking a bus out of the city.

I would think at that point this guy has got a round trip ticket to somewhere, unless he risks being seen buying a ticket after the shooting. It is not known if the e-bike was taken from someone. If so, someone didn't get their bagels delivered on time that morning. Another crime.

His handgun was identified, but not recovered. His somewhat designer, upscale backpack was also identified, but eventually found in a wooded area of Central Park. A water bottle he bought at Starbucks was found at the crime scene with unusable, smudged fingerprints. A cell phone was recovered at the scene. Details from that have not yet been revealed.

Perpetrators are identified and caught because of tiny details left behind: DNA, a smile, a missing license plate, a parking ticket, a published treatise. Something will be key to finding the gunman.

In a book review I just read in the WSJ about a book on letter bombers, it is revealed that in 1919 radical Galleanists sent some 30 letter bombs to U.S. politicians. The Galleanists were followers of an Italian anarchist, Luigi Galleani, and one form of perpetuating their terror was to craft letter bombs.

In the book, 'Murder by Mail', by Mitchell P. Roth and Mahmut Cengiz, and reviewed by Bryan Burroughs, a raft of intended letters never got there because they wound up in a pile in the post office marked for Insufficient Postage.

It seems the Galleanists didn't bother to present the mail to a postal clerk who might have weighed the letters and affixed the correct postage, but rather just winged what they thought was enough postage to effect the delivery. I guess not.

There will always be something.

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