What Public Reaction to the Murder of a Health Insurance CEO Tells Us
The system is beyond broken
The CEO of one of the United States’ largest health insurance companies was gunned down yesterday in New York City while heading to an annual investor meeting. The police described it as a “targeted attack,” and a video depicted a gunman calmly carrying out the killing and then riding away on an e-bike.
Whatever the motive, the way people reacted to the murder says a lot about the state of America.
The New York Times reported that a law enforcement official said the slain UnitedHealthcare CEO “had recently received several threats and that the police were investigating their source and exact nature, but noted that healthcare executives can often receive threats because of the nature of their work.”1
The nature of their work.
Why would death threats be the natural result of running a health insurance company?
To people outside the US, this must sound very bizarre.
The late CEO’s wife confirmed to NBC News following the murder that there had been threats against her husband. She didn’t seem to know exactly why, saying, “Basically, I don’t know, a lack of coverage?2
While the motive in this case is still unknown, that’s a good guess, and it’s the assumption that pretty much everyone commenting online reached. Some people were outright celebrating the death as payback for all the Americans who died after being denied coverage by UnitedHealthcare.
Others condemned the murder but expressed that this kind of thing was inevitable since nobody seems to care about how much Americans are suffering due to the unchecked behavior of health insurance companies. Many of the comments mimicked the language insurers use when they are denying claims. A tweet announcing news of the murder had more than 6,0000 “likes” last time I checked.3
It should go without saying that murder is never justified.
But we would be unwise to ignore the strong sentiment that health insurance executives are so indifferent to the suffering they inflict on people that they shouldn't expect any concern when harm befalls them, especially when they are so transparent about the fact that they intend to find new ways to deny health care so they can make more money.
UnitedHealthcare is currently battling a lawsuit over its use of an AI model to reject claims for elderly patients even though the company knew it had a 90 percent error rate. The company overrode patients' physicians and denied care those physicians had deemed medically necessary.
The lawsuit, filed by families of now-deceased former beneficiaries of the insurance behemoth claimed, "The elderly are prematurely kicked out of care facilities nationwide or forced to deplete family savings to continue receiving necessary medical care, all because [UnitedHealth's] AI model 'disagrees' with their real live doctors' determinations."4
Another lawsuit against UnitedHealthcare launched by a patient who was denied care for a crippling disease was covered by Pro Publica:
[The lawsuit] uncovered a trove of materials, including internal emails and tape-recorded exchanges among company employees. Those records offer an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at how one of America's leading healthcare insurers relentlessly fought to reduce spending on care, even as its profits rose to record levels.
You can read the whole thing, but suffice it to say that UnitedHealthcare had zero interest in making sure the patient received proper care; instead, they were single-minded in the desire to cut costs no matter the harm it caused. From Pro Publica:
In emails, officials calculated what [the patient] was costing them to keep his crippling disease at bay and how much they would save if they forced him to undergo a cheaper treatment that had already failed him. [U]nited employees misrepresented critical findings and ignored warnings from doctors about the risks of altering [the patient's] drug plan.
The United States is the richest country in the world. We should have the easiest access to health care, yet a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that roughly 60 percent of insured adults experience problems when they use their insurance.5
Why are people paying ungodly amounts for health care premiums, co-pays and deductables and then being denied care? Why are a third of Americans mired in medical debt, many of whom have insurance?
The biggest question is: Why is our health care in the hands of executives who are rewarded financially for finding new ways to deny care to desperate people?
None of this is normal—not the rapacious industry enriching itself off of denying health care or the joy so many feel upon hearing of the murder of an insurance executive in the middle of New York City.
One wonders just how bad this has to get before our leaders do something.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/04/nyregion/brian-thompson-uhc-ceo-shot
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/manhattan/brian-thompson-united-healthcare-ceo-threats/6039242/
https://x.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1864310979258937685
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unitedhealth-lawsuit-ai-deny-claims-medicare-advantage-health-insurance-denials/
https://www.kff.org/private-insurance/poll-finding/kff-survey-of-consumer-experiences-with-health-insurance
Oh God Kirsten. When this flashed on the NYT yesterday I thought ALL the thoughts. About how broken it all is. How this guy could be a good family man and still be responsible, at least in part, for so much endless pain and suffering. About how he was walking into a financial results meeting of pat- each- other- on- the - back business people profiting madly from the health care industry. How business executives are exonerated from all of the massive awfulness they perpetrate. It was an awful murder. When we start unpeeling the layers however, there is rot to the core.
It's all so awful.
I've lived in Italy for only two years so far, but already the entire "healthcare" system of my native U.S. just feels completely, utterly bonkers to me. The fact that the RICHEST country in the history of humanity does not offer at least basic healthcare coverage to all its citizens is just insane. The fact that Americans have simply accepted that, and in fact claim that such a system is somehow superior to that of other advanced countries—despite all the evidence to the contrary—is inexplicable.