Who Is Allowed to Kill in America?
Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed in cold blood yesterday in what police are investigating as a targeted attack, and on Facebook, UnitedHealth Group wrote “We are deeply saddened and shocked at the passing of our dear friend and colleague Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Brian was a highly respected colleague and friend to all who worked with him. We are working closely with the New York Police Department and ask for your patience and understanding during this difficult time. Our hearts go out to Brian’s family and all who were close to him.”
Jezebel’s Kylie Cheung wrote on Bluesky that she heard “they took down the post at 21k laugh [reactions].”
While we don’t know the killer’s motive yet, the words “deny, defend and depose” were written on the shell casings, which describe insurance company stalling tactics and makes this look like something out of Mr. Robot. NBC also reported that “former FBI supervisor Rob D’Amico said Wednesday that Thompson’s slaying has all the makings of a personal vendetta tied to the victim’s company.” While the facts of this current moment are that we do not know why the assassin did this, that has become secondary to people’s reaction to it. What has unfolded in the wake of the killing of a CEO is far more salient than the story of just another person getting shot in America.
I wonder what could possibly cause someone to have a personal vendetta tied to UnitedHealthcare?
Today we remember the legacy of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein.bsky.social) December 4, 2024 at 9:30 AM
Many people like White House weathervane and cable news recorder Aaron Rupar have reacted to posts like this and the 21k laugh reactions on Facebook with revulsion, saying that it’s “absolutely depraved to get your dunks in when the guy was just murdered in cold blood.”
While it’s understandable to value humanity in a moment where one of us is so vividly lost, a question I would pose to Aaron Rupar and others who agree with this sentiment is: what do you think of the French Revolution which was inspired by our Founding Fathers and celebrated in America? Were they justified in dragging aristocrats from their homes, decapitating them and parading their heads around on pikes? If so, what makes our modern Gilded Age different?
Revolutions are romanticized in the past, but when confronted with the actual reality they present in the present, many understandably recoil. Violence is antithetical to a functioning society, and if we can just go around assassinating whoever we want, then human civilization has failed in America. But why does this violence, of pulling out a gun and deliberately killing someone, resonate more with so many than the violence doled out every day by Brian Thompson’s company?
Denying insurance claims is violence. The astronomical cost of health care in America forces people to choose between death and bankruptcy every year, which is exacerbated by insurance companies trying to weasel their way out of their commitments in the name of profit maximization. A 2016 study found that the cost of cancer care is nearly as deadly as cancer itself. We don’t think of this kind of stuff as violence because it is baked into our assumptions about how a capitalist society functions, but that doesn’t make the impact of this system on people any less violent.
The performance of CEOs like Brian Thompson is judged by how much money they make, which is tied directly to how much they pay out for life-saving services they are financially incentivized to not render. The market said Brian Thompson was good at his job, as UnitedHealth Group’s stock was up nearly 60 percent over his tenure as CEO, but he was also operating in a business model that can’t lose. From its very bottom during the Great Financial Crisis in October 2008, UnitedHealth Group’s stock price is up nearly 4,000 percent. Over the same time that American life expectancy fell as the country got sicker, poorer and angrier at a system obviously designed to bilk them for profits at the expense of their health, health insurance profits boomed. These developments are very clearly related and anyone saying they are not is in deep denial about how this business actually works.
Last year, Pro Publica detailed how insurance companies are dedicated to keeping these claim denial numbers a secret, and the public’s reaction to the assumed assassination of a health insurance CEO tells you why. Pro Publica has also investigated how “Cigna saves millions by having its doctors reject claims without reading them,” and revealed that “More than 200 million Americans are covered by private health insurance. But data from state and federal regulators shows that insurers reject about 1 in 7 claims for treatment” in a report on how UnitedHealthcare flags “high dollar accounts” and finds ways to not cover expensive treatments recommended by people’s doctors. PBS conducted an analysis last year and found that health insurance claim denials are on the rise, and UnitedHealth Group’s stock price has followed. The net result of all this is that KFF polling found that 41 percent of adults have some form of medical debt, proving that health insurance companies do not exist primarily to help people pay for healthcare.
The health insurance business is flush with blood money. Comics like these made before Thompson’s killing aren’t just inspired by people’s imaginations, they’re rooted in a brutal reality a lot of well-off people are blind to, willfully or not.
sitting in a waiting room this morning while my partner had a 6 hour long cancer removal surgery when I saw the news that the insurance CEO was shot. Im paying out of pocket because the best alternative for us is partial coverage @ 1000 a month with a 15000 deductible. Anyway heres a unrelated comic
— zach (@extrafabulous.bsky.social) December 4, 2024 at 1:22 PM
To put it in language that capitalist economists can understand: violence is a negative externality of capitalism, and for-profit health insurance is capitalism taken to its most depraved logical ends. Any system that prioritizes profit above all else is by definition going to push its costs on to the population, and for some industries, that cost is death. The perfect examples of this fundamental fact can be found over decades in West Virginia mining towns, like how Pinnacle Mining Complex recently discharged dirty mine water into the local area and caused widespread illnesses. Why should an entity solely designed around making money care if it’s pouring poison in the town’s water supply if that’s the cheaper option? Protecting vulnerable people is explicitly not capitalism’s problem, and creating them is a feature of profit maximization, not a bug.
Capitalism isn’t necessarily immoral, it’s amoral, which allows for immoral actions to flourish. It doesn’t even incorporate morality into its simple profit-driven framework. It is an inhuman system which promises us that if only it was perfectly managed by The Right People, then it could function how it truly is supposed to, and not how it has actually imposed itself on society since it rose to global power alongside the Transatlantic Slave Trade. For-profit health insurance is perhaps the perfect avatar for capitalism’s fundamental laws that lead its capitalists to value profits over people.
The state has a monopoly on violence, and our aristocratic government that is America’s fundamental problem has awarded this power to its corporate offspring. People in Gaza and across the Middle East die en masse over decades because that’s just how it is in a world run by defense contractors, but when some finally fight back against the imperial core brutalizing them, it is unspeakable terrorism representative of the entire region. The same dynamic holds for this assassination of a health insurance CEO. Brian Thompson can make more money than he could ever hope to spend off a business designed to steal money from sick people and not be seen as a violent actor, but someone who may be affected by his violent decisions who wants to kill him over it is deemed unfit for society by respectable society.
How we have reacted to this says a lot about America writ large. The avalanche of laugh emojis don’t happen in a country that is functioning well for everyone, and neither does a Parisian dragging an aristocrat out of his house to brutally assassinate him in front of his family. That our culture romanticizes the latter while it condemns the former says a lot about how dishonest America is with itself about this country’s true nature. Violence is the only language the state truly understands, and there is something to be said for its effectiveness as a tactic to accomplish the long-term goal of building a better world for everyone.
Anthem backtracks on decision to cap anesthesiology coverage in Connecticut
— Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) December 5, 2024 at 12:01 PM
Everywhere you look, violence is inflicted on innocent people in the name of corporate profits. This is just how it works in America, but gunning down someone who inflicted corporate violence on others? That’s a bridge too far for many. It brings the inherent nature of this country too close to our noses and makes the constant din of violence in America impossible to ignore. The juxtaposition of the different kinds of killing here and the various reactions to it proves that the best way to conceal blood in the United States is under a pile of money. But this flippant and celebratory response by large swaths of society to the murder of a health insurance CEO before we even know the killer’s true motive is proving what literal capitalist Nick Hanauer wrote in Politico in 2014: “The Pitchforks Are Coming…For Us Plutocrats.”