What the Murder of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Means to America
Of course, the solution, in the end, can’t be indifference—not indifference to the death of the C.E.O., and not the celebration of it, either. But who’s going to drop their indifference first? At this point, it’s not going to be the people, who have a lifetime of evidence that health-insurance C.E.O.s do not care about their well-being. Can the C.E.O. class drop its indifference to the suffering and death of ordinary people? Is it possible to do so while achieving record quarterly profits for your stakeholders, in perpetuity?
Thompson’s death resurfaced some unsavory details about his industry. We learned, for instance, that Thompson was one of several UnitedHealth executives under investigation by the D.O.J. for accusations of insider trading. (He had sold more than fifteen million dollars’ worth of company stock in February, shortly before it became public that the Department of Justice was investigating the company for antitrust violations, which caused the stock price to drop.) A new policy from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield also went viral: the company had announced that, in certain states, starting in 2025, it would no longer pay for anesthesia if a surgery passed a pre-allotted time limit. The cost of the “extra” anesthesia would be passed from Anthem—whose year-over-year net income was reported, in June, to have increased by more than twenty-four per cent, to $2.3 billion—to the patient. On Thursday, the company withdrew the change in response to the public outrage, if only in Connecticut, for now. It’s hard not to be curious about what, if anything, might happen to UnitedHealthcare’s claim-denial rates. I was at a show in midtown Manhattan on Thursday night, and when the comedians onstage cracked a joke about the shooter the entire place erupted in cheers.
Brian Thompson Was Never Content With the Status Quo
Andrew Witty, CEO of UnitedHealth, parent company of UnitedHealthcare:
We know the health system does not work as well as it should, and we understand people’s frustrations with it. No one would design a system like the one we have. And no one did. It’s a patchwork built over decades. Our mission is to help make it work better. We are willing to partner with anyone, as we always have — health care providers, employers, patients, pharmaceutical companies, governments and others — to find ways to deliver high-quality care and lower costs.
(Emphasis mine.) Bullshit. Your one and only mandate is to extract as much value for your stakeholders as possible, health and human life be damned.
Health care is both intensely personal and very complicated, and the reasons behind coverage decisions are not well understood. We share some of the responsibility for that. Together with employers, governments and others who pay for care, we need to improve how we explain what insurance covers and how decisions are made. Behind each decision lies a comprehensive and continually updated body of clinical evidence focused on achieving the best health outcomes and ensuring patient safety.
You've conveniently left out the mandate for profit generation, Andrew.
While the health system is not perfect, every corner of it is filled with people who try to do their best for those they serve.
Brian was one of those people. He was raised in the same Iowa farmhouse as his mom. His dad spent more than 40 years unloading trucks at grain elevators. B.T., as we knew him, worked farm jobs as a kid and fished at a gravel pit with his brother. He never forgot where he came from, because it was the needs of people who live in places like Jewell, Iowa, that he considered first in finding ways to improve care.
Pandering to middle America, ✔
The ideas he advocated were aimed at making health care more affordable, more transparent, more intuitive, more compassionate — and more human.
Fuck you, Andrew Witty.
I've said this before, but corporations are money-making machines. That's the sole reason for their existence: to generate profit for the stakeholders and shareholders. That's it. Dont ever fool yourself into thinking that any corporation has your best interest at heart — ever.
Suspect in UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Killing Went Silent for Months. Where Was He?
Friends and family members have been left bewildered by the jarring transformation of a young man who had seemed destined for a life of achievement. He was the valedictorian at his elite prep school in Maryland and a computer science graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s acclaimed engineering program, with wide-ranging social connections and significant ambition.
How could a person “destined for a life of achievement” possibly come to the conclusion that health insurance companies are immoral, unjust, and beyond the reach of the law? 😱
Luigi Mangione Is Everywhere
Indeed, “Deny, Defend, Depose,” which is widely viewed as a pointed critique of the health insurance industry in America, has become a rallying cry online in recent days as the focus moved away from the shooting itself and onto the shooter and his motives.
However, the fictionalized version of the shooter that was created online does not match reality. Mangione, who allegedly had a handwritten manifesto admitting to the killing in his possession when arrested, is a software engineer from a privileged background. He also follows popular right-wing influencers, such as Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Jordan Peterson—though he has also criticized some of the arguments put forward by these figures.
During a brief court appearance on Monday night, the police did not outline a motive for the shooting, but based on Mangione’s online posts and reading lists, it appears that the pain from an injury suffered while surfing could have played a significant part in his motivation.
I don't understand the pearl-clutching in the wake of the shooting. The CEO of a healthcare company known for some really shady shit is not a moral person, no matter how respectable (read: wealthy, clean-cut, dresses like he's on a golf course) he appears. Brian Thompson decided profit was more important to him than the health of fellow human beings… So what are we mourning the loss of, exactly?
What about the justice system, you might ask? Well, fellow American, do you genuinely believe that the justice system holds people like Brian Thompson to task for their misdeeds? Does the justice system even consider what he did illegal?
Spare me the moralizing.
I'm not happy my culture has been so corrupted that I've come to accept violence as a way to hold some people to account, but what do we expect? To all things come balance, and with wealth (and health) inequality at current rates, balance will find a way. I'm not saying it will be pretty or pleasant or palatable, but it will find a way, which should only incentivize us to usher in some progressive legislation on wealth distribution sooner rather than later. (But be honest with me — do you think that'll happen?)
May we all aspire to be kind, loving, moral people who don't prioritize money over the health and well-being of other humans.
Unlike Brian Thompson.
Trying to scold the entire internet
Thompson’s death been a real shock to the system for America’s ruling class, who seem to be realizing for the first time that the majority of the country will not mourn their deaths. As podcaster and reporter Michael Hobbes wrote a few years ago, “I think we'll look back on the last decade as a time when social media gave previously marginalized groups the ability to speak directly to elites and, as a result, elites lost their minds.” Which is why a whole bunch of tedious hall monitors are suddenly tut-tutting about all the memes in every major newspaper. I, personally, am not going super hard on the pro-assassination memes — as funny as they are — because we just don’t know what the motive was. We live in a time of mass accelerationist violence and I don’t feel like publicly cheerleading a guy who might have a compound full of deranged far-right ramblings. But I’m also not stupid enough to think that scolding the entire internet for how they’re acting is a meaningful use of my time on planet Earth. Maybe if I had a paid column somewhere — or proper health insurance — I’d feel different.
The UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting
Even if you believe Thompson was all the evil things so many people online say he was — a corrupt corporate CEO guilty of insider trading and working as the face of a company that denies life-saving coverage to tens of thousands of Americans a year in the name of profit — he was a corporate cog. He was responsible to a board and to shareholders. And, in short order, he'll be replaced by another CEO. Nothing will change, except that killing someone in the middle of Manhattan whom you deem evil could now become more normal.
I know how a lot of people might react to me writing this, because I've already encountered the refrains. "It's good these people are scared," is one common throughline of the response. In other words: "No, I don't necessarily support killing corporate CEOs in cold blood on the streets, but if CEOs scale back their predatory behavior because they’re scared of reprisal, that’s a net good.” Or, of course, people might react by saying that I am more worried about the killing of one CEO than a system that kills tens or hundreds of thousands of people a year.
I suppose there's something appealing about these kinds of arguments. They are not entirely unlike arguments I've made in the past — like that we should be prosecuting more corrupt presidents and members of Congress, not fewer, stability of the system be damned. The obvious difference, though, is that when I made those arguments they came from a place of demanding accountability — insisting that the system do a better job of rooting out corruption and evil, not cheering extrajudicial violence on the streets.
To put it differently: If you are hoping for our rich corporate overlords to live in fear of expedited, unanswerable and unexpected punishment, then you are necessarily hoping for us common folk to start delivering that punishment. Which requires us to be the arbiters of who is good and who is evil. The left might consider how long it'll be until abortion-providing doctors or trans activists or Democratic politicians start regularly being mowed down in the street in the name of striking fear into evildoers. If that's the world you want to live in, I strongly suggest signing off the internet and going to spend some time outside.
An Assassin Showed Just How Angry America Really Is
While I really dislike a lot of these people, none of us should want to live in a country where assassination becomes a method of political expression. It’s hard to see democracy surviving if elected leaders and corporate leaders feel they might be shot at any point. And that’s why we have to actually get our laws working again. I hope that men like Carl Nichols and Fortune 500 CEOs start to wake up, and see that there is deep rage outside their clubby environs that can’t be fixed with security measures but must be addressed by some measure of social obligation to the people who live here.
After all, societies that give citizens no way to control their own lives, but put the fate of their people in the hands of distant masters with no concern at all for their wellbeing, invite disaster. We’ve always known that. It’s one of the main reasons for the passage of our antitrust laws. So I hope we can get some control over our society again, before we truly do spin out of control.
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson Is Fatally Shot in New York City
We know it’s not antifa because they’ve never been this effective.
When our cities are no longer safe for extraordinarily wealthy insurance CEOs, what’s our country coming to?
Health care industry executives, like those in the insurance and defense industries, face increased risks “because of the services that are being provided and the emotion that comes along with some of those services,” Mr. Komendat said.
That’s an actual quote in the New York Times.
“Because of the services that are being provided and the emotion that comes along with those services.”
Wow.
What an obtuse way to say “these industries kill a lot of people.”
America Is Headed Toward Collapse
The long history of human society compiled in our database suggests that America’s current economy is so lucrative for the ruling elites that achieving fundamental reform might require a violent revolution. But we have reason for hope. It is not unprecedented for a ruling class—with adequate pressure from below—to allow for the nonviolent reversal of elite overproduction. But such an outcome requires elites to sacrifice their near-term self-interest for our long-term collective interests. At the moment, they don’t seem prepared to do that.