Japan killer attacked to ‘stop WWIII’
HE WANTS TO make America uninsured again.
An insurance company popular among Silicon Valley investors that was co-founded by the brother of Donald Trump’s sonin-law announced Tuesday it is leaving thousands of its customers high and dry.
Oscar insurance slashed its coverage in half — from 40,000 doctors to only 20,000 — company CEO Mario Schlosser wrote in a blog post.
Oscar’s hospital network in New York will also shrink from 77 facilities to just 31, according to Vox. The remaining 31 hospitals are almost entirely in the Montefiore, Mount Sinai and the Long Island Health Network systems.
The startup — valued at $2.7 billion — lost a whopping $92.4 million in New York alone last year.
The company, which reportedly has 145,000 customers nationwide, was started in 2010 by three Harvard Business School grads, including Josh Kushner.
Kushner is the brother of Jared Kushner, the husband of Ivanka Trump who has emerged as one of his father-in-law’s closest advisers during his presidential campaign. Earlier this month, Jared, writing in his own newspaper, The New York Observer, tried to defend Donald Trump, saying, “My father-inlaw is not an anti-Semite.”
Now, Josh Kushner and fellow Oscar execs are doing their own damage control. The company even sought to spin the reduction in coverage — which goes into effect next year — as part of its overall business plan of providing more seamless medical care.
“We have chosen partners who are committed to the same vision of better end-to-end health care — and who are willing to work closely with us to create it,” Schlosser wrote. But Matt DeSilva, 46, of Brooklyn, said in the last year he’d endured an avalanche of headaches due to Oscar’s failure to properly cover his diabetes medicine. “This year I started to have pretty serious problems with them. They completely screwed up my deductible. I kept getting charged for stuff I shouldn’t have,” said DeSilva, a real estate agent. “Doctors are having problems getting paid. My medical doctor just dropped them.” DeSilva said the coverage was decent at first, but got worse this year. “I’m very disappointed. They came out sounding like they were going to shake up the whole health insurance industry and make it more transparent. Now, 21/2 years in, they’re just like everybody else,” he said.
“My guess is they’re pulling what a lot of companies do — hit you with a surprise bill and hope that you pay it.”
A Daily News reporter informed DeSilva about the looming reduction in coverage.
“That’s a problem!” he said, adding that he would be looking for alternative insurance if it weren’t for the fact that he would soon get on his fianceé’s insurance.
The company said it hopes customers will accept the limited network in exchange for perks like easy scheduling of appointments through an app, alerts that tell your doctor if you’ve been to the emergency room and better integration with hospitals and doctors’ offices.
Still, Oscar’s cuts will also come with a hike in rates by an average of 16% in New York.
The company declined comment. to SAGAMIHARA, Japan — A young Japanese man who went on a stabbing rampage Tuesday at a facility for the mentally disabled where he had been fired, killing 19 people, had given a letter to Parliament months earlier outlining the bloody plan and saying all disabled people should be put to death.
When he was done, Kanagawa Prefect authorities said, 26-yearold Satoshi Uematsu had slain or injured nearly a third of the almost 150 patients at the facility in a matter of 40 minutes in the early Tuesday attack. It is Japan’s deadliest mass killing in decades.
In February, Uematsu tried to hand-deliver a letter to Parliament’s lower house speaker that revealed his dark turmoil. It demanded that all disabled people be put to death through “a world that allows for mercy killing,” Kyodo news agency and TBS TV reported.
Uematsu boasted in the letter that he had the ability to kill 470 disabled people in what he called “a revolution,” and outlined plans to attack two facilities, after which he said he would turn himself in.
“My reasoning is that I may be able to revitalize the world economy, and I thought it may be possible to prevent World War III,” the letter says.