It is a reasonable first order estimate. See a comment here. I think I will organize this a bit better and make a blog post on this tomorrow. But suffice to say, 51,000 is a good baseline number, based on UHC's share of the private insurance market and the length of Thompson's tenure as CEO of UHC. It could be as high as 100,000. But really, at this scale, it ceases to matter. You can only really comprehend it in comparative terms. And his number of victims was order of magnitude greater than that of Osama Bin Ladin.

Not OP, but it's going to be really hard to assign a hard value to that. There are plenty of obvious examples where they denied a life-saving treatment. But many of them would've died anyway.

Then there are cases where they deny preventative/early treatments. Some of these eventually led to more serious and fatal conditions, some did not. How do we count these?

Then there's quality of life denials. These don't directly lead to fatal conditions, but can affect morale and the like, thus allowing more serious conditions?

All of it would be compared to the unexplored alternatives (where treatment was authorized). This is inherently an unknown.

I'm not defending him by any means. It's just that his body count is, at best, a rough estimate.

I'm no math wizard but I've read 68k people die per year from preventable shit due to denied claims. Brian worked at United since 2004, CEO since 2021 so he contributed directly or indirectly to that number of deaths per year, at least the portion United is responsible for. United has double the industry average of rejected claims.

It's def higher than OP states.