Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Did UnitedHealth CEO Dump Stock Because of Antitrust Investigation?
As the internet continues to collectively shrug at, joke about, or outright celebrate the shooting of Minnesota-based UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan yesterday morning, journalist Ken Klippenstein has done a little digging into allegations that Thompson sold more than $15 million of UHC stock during a federal antitrust investigation into the insurer without informing investors.
Klippenstein reports on a suit from the Hollywood Firefighters’ Pension Fund contending that Thompson dumped his stock before news of the investigation was made public. He also asked some folks at UHC how they feel about the company. “Thompson took massive pay outs while we at the bottom had to work harder and longer,” according to one employee. “They have the money for AI and massive bonuses, but we’re still using software that is massively behind the industry standard. They’ve been lying to us.”
But the general goodwill surrounding Thomson’s murder is not sitting well with the Strib’s Evan Ramstad, who laments that people are so upset with our broken-beyond-repair (my words, not his) healthcare system that “they are willing to shunt aside good manners and simple decency to lash out over a tragedy.”
Seems, however, that the lesson here is that when you oversee a company that is indifferent to people’s suffering, those people will be just as indifferent to yours. People justifiably hate large private insurers, and UnitedHealth is a particular awful company. As Ramstad notes, it denies 1 in 3 claims, and elsewhere at the Strib, Jeremy Olson has a good rundown on why UHC so bad and hated. That's a bigger story than “some people were mean online,” and it'd be nice if an elected official or two would take notice of that collective rage.
Until then, you know what they say: A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is just the U.S. health insurance industry doing its job.
Frey, Council Still at Odds
We’d hoped—o lord had we hoped!—that the next time we wrote about the proposed Minneapolis Labor Standards Board we’d be able to say the damn thing was making recommendations to the City Council for ordinances that the mayor would shoot down.
But the course of Minneapolis politics never does run smooth, and today the City Council failed, by a vote of 8-5, to override a mayoral veto. While the LSB initially passed with a veto-proof majority, two yea votes flipped to nay this time around, dooming the measure. Jamal Osman released a statement saying the measure “sought to establish an unfair and unbalanced board after limiting public engagement with elected officials” (which doesn’t explain why he voted for it the first time around), and we’re still waiting to hear Andrea Jenkins’s rationale.
Also today, the council rejected Frey’s proposed plan for George Floyd Square, instead passing a separate measure calling for the creation of a pedestrian mall on the site. “I’m frustrated that the can continues to get kicked down the road,” Frey responded Freyishly to the news, and we can surely expect an email soon from his buds at the All of Mpls PAC denouncing “the DSA” for obstructing the mayor’s vision.
But from the perspective of several council members, they’re being forced into premature votes by an uncooperative mayor. As Kyle Stokes from Axios reports, Council Member Katie Cashman expressed frustration with a lack of communication from the mayor’s office prior to vote, while Council Member Jeremiah Ellison said the mayor should have hashed his plan out with council before submitting it to an “all or nothing” vote.
Chalamania Sweeps Through Minneapolis
Move over, Walz—there’s a new Tim in town. Timothée Chalamet, as you’ve surely heard by now, plays a young Bob Dylan in the upcoming biopic A Complete Unknown, and he’s in town to promote the film.
Chalamet will be doing red carpet duties and participating in a Q&A before a special screening tonight at the Main Cinema, to which U of M students got direct invitations. Chalamet teased the event on Instagram, first posting the University of Minnesota logo, and then a photo of the Main marquee captioned with “TONITE,” a colloquial misspelling of the word “tonight.”
Here are some pics of Chalamet (who seems pretty cool but I’m sorry is no fuckin’ way 5’10” as his bio claims) posing with ordinary folks in Dinkytown. Expect to see many more before he leaves us.
Grant Will Help Preserve Somali Culture
“In the Somali diaspora, the lullabies sung by mothers and grandmothers, the folktales passed on by fathers and grandfathers, and the poems recited by community elders are quickly disappearing,” writes Atra Mohamed for the Sahan Journal. But despite the rapid disappearance of Somali oral culture in the U.S., there’s some good news. Writer and researcher Marian Hassan has just received a $121,000 Minnesota Legacy Cultural Heritage Grant to launch the Sing-Again Lullaby and Oral History Project. She’ll interview Somali elders and will collect what she learns from them into a book, with video and audio supplements. “This is urgent for Somali people because they have not been here too long, and it is alarming to see the fast rate at which the language is disappearing,” Marian told Sahan.
