Legalized Murder

Legalized Murder

If the motive for the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is the denial of coverage for essential medical services, what does it say that there could be tens of millions of suspects?

Apart from the executions of certain notorious criminals and the deaths of certain despots and terrorists, I can’t recall any public death provoking the approval that has greeted the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City on December 4. There’s no way to applaud the death of a human being and not seem callous. And I wonder if those reacting that way would feel the same after watching the video of the murder itself—not the edited version playing on TV news, but the full version. It begins with the killer calmly walking up to Thompson and shooting him in the back, Thompson’s stride suddenly breaking as he stumbles to the ground, and the killer following the fallen Thompson to empty his gun into him before coolly walking away. They should also read the quote from Thompson’s widow, soon after his death, saying she was trying to figure out a way to explain his murder to their children.

It’s not like vast swaths of a population are immune from giving in to their cruelest impulses—that’s what the November 5 election was about. But when a business executive is publicly murdered and the popular reaction ranges from disdain for the victim to outright approval, there’s something unprecedented going on, and cursory condemnation won’t get us close to understanding what that is.

The man who murdered Thompson, for whatever reason, deserves to be punished. But if we’re going to be honest about the public’s utter lack of sympathy, we have to acknowledge that it springs from the legalized murder practiced by all the Brian Thompsons who run the American medical insurance industry. The last thirty-six hours have seen an outpouring of statistics, personal testimony, and news stories that I find perhaps even more coldly upsetting than the footage of the murder. The statistics include UnitedHealthcare having the highest denial rate—32 percent in 2023—of any U.S. insurance company. The personal testimony includes an outraged letter from a pediatric oncologist to UHC about their decision not to cover anti-nausea medication for a child undergoing chemotherapy, and a woman describing how the company claimed that an overnight hospital stay was not “medically necessary” for her twelve-year-old who had just gone through heart surgery. A colleague of mine whose late father was a doctor told me that the man regularly had to fight with the company to get approval for the most routine procedures. UHC was sued last year by the families of two deceased Minnesota patients who claimed the company used an AI bot that routinely denied doctor-approved claims. The plaintiffs alleged the bot had a 90 percent error rate, and that UHC knew that.

Can anyone seriously doubt that Thompson approved this way of business? Not when the company’s 2023 earnings were $371.6 billion, up $47.5 billion from the previous year. How much would the company still have made if they actually provided people the care they promised?

You don’t have to approve of Thompson’s murder to be disgusted by these stories. But I do think you’d have to be more than a little naïve to think that you can, as a matter of policy, deny people healthcare (some of it lifesaving) and bankrupt many of them in the process, all for the express purpose of making money, and not have someone take potentially lethal exception. I can’t pretend to think that the fear Thompson’s murder is causing in the insurance world is a bad thing. Just before I wrote this, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield announced it is abandoning its plan to strictly limit the time it will pay for people having surgery to receive anesthesia. A corporate world that isn’t shy about the sheer arrogance of denying coverage for anesthesia during surgery is not one that incurs sympathy for a dead CEO. That may be why the initial reaction some had to the news that the police had a photo of the shooter’s face and a smudged fingerprint was disappointment.

It may be that if the shooter is found, he will make us recoil. It may be that he’s a lone nut, not acting to avenge a loved one, not striking out in bloody-minded objection to the insurance industry, possibly even acting in response to the news that Thompson allegedly dumped $15 million in stock before a federal antitrust investigation—an investigation he did not reveal to shareholders. But it’s hard to believe so after the news that the bullet casings left at the murder scene were marked by three words—Deny, Defend, Depose—that are supposedly the insurance industry mantra for wearing down claimants.

I do not want to live in a world where the rich are dragged from their limos and beaten. But I do think that world is a lot more likely to be realized because of the modus operandi of UHC and its cohort. If the motive for the killing really is an insurance company denying essential medical services, what does it say that there could be tens of millions of suspects?

Charles Taylor lives in New York. He writes a Substack called Crackers in Bed, where a version of this article first appeared.