The book criticizing the US healthcare insurance industry whose title resembles words etched on to shell casings found at the scene of the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week has soared towards the top of the Amazon bestseller list.
Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It, is now No 3 on the site’s nonfiction bestseller list. On Tuesday, it reached No 2, CNN noted.
Thompson was gunned down in midtown Manhattan on 4 December by a masked gunman suspected to be Luigi Mangione, 26, who is fighting extradition to New York after his arrest in Pennsylvania. Bullet casings found near the shooting had the words “depose”, “deny” and “defend” written on them in a striking echo of the title.
Delay, Deny, Defend was published in 2010 and authored by Jay Feinman, a specialist in insurance law at Rutgers law school. It exposes the various ways in which insurance companies avoid meeting the promise they make to Americans by failing to pay claims.
“An insurance company’s greatest expense is what it pays out in claims,” an online excerpt of the book says. “If it pays out less in claims, it keeps more in profits. Therefore, the claims department became a profit center rather than the place that kept the company’s promise.”
It is not known whether the suspect has read or had any knowledge of Feinman’s book. Social media entries apparently posted by Mangione discuss his struggles with a rare back condition called spondylolisthesis.
A Goodreads account thought to be held by Mangione reviewed books on back pain including Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery.
Feinman has declined to comment on the CEO killing or the words scrawled on the gun casings. A couple of days after the shooting, however, he posted on social media that the paperback of the book was being restocked by Amazon and that bulk orders could be made on the title’s website page.
