Why "we" want insurance executives dead
No, that does not mean people should murder them. But if you've watched a loved one suffer and die from insurance denial, it's normal to wish the people responsible would suffer the same fate.
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Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was fatally shot Wednesday outside the New York Hilton Midtown in Manhattan, where the company was hosting its investor day. Thompson, 50, had been CEO of UnitedHealthcare, UnitedHealth Group’s insurance arm, since 2021, overseeing a wide range of health plans and benefits.
Within seconds of the news breaking, people online began celebrating. A Facebook post by UnitedHealthcare about the CEO's passing was met with over 23,000 laughing emojis before it was taken down. "Health insurance companies are parasites siphoning blood money from the sick, dying and injured,” one user posted. “I'm only surprised it hasn't happened sooner.”
Twitter and Instagram users began remixing video of the shooting to pop songs and posting celebratory GIFs. “My empathy is out of network for this one,” one user said.
People with alternative insurance providers posted the "lord I have seen what you have done for others meme." When images of the shooter were released on Thursday morning, people began making fancams and thirsting after him. “Every woman I know is down catastrophic for the United Healthcare CEO assassin,” one Twitter user said.
Naturally, the mainstream media began pearl clutching in outrage. After I posted a quote tweet about insurance companies no longer paying for certain anesthesia with the phrase, "And people wonder why we want these executives dead," legacy media outlets including Fox News pounced and wrote a slew of articles about my "calls for violence."
Let me be super clear: my post uses a collective "we" and is explaining the public sentiment. It is not me personally saying "I want these executives dead and so we should kill them." I am explaining that thousands of Americans (myself included) are fed up with our barbaric healthcare system and the people at the top who rake in millions while inflicting pain, suffering, and death on millions of innocent people.
If you have watched a loved one die because an insurance conglomerate has denied their life saving treatment as a cost cutting measure, yes, it's natural to wish that the people who run such conglomerates would suffer the same fate.
As fellow journalist
posted, "No shit murder is bad. The [commentary and jokes] about the United CEO aren’t really about him; they’re about the rapacious healthcare system he personified and which Americans feel deep pain and humiliation about."This is what the media fails to understand. They don't see insurance CEOs who sanction the deaths of thousands of innocent people a year by denying them coverage, often coverage doctors deem medically necessary, as violent.
Journalist Kylie Cheung put it this way: "The way we're socialized to see violence only as interpersonal—not see state violence (policies that create poverty/kill), structural violence, institutional violence—is very deliberate."
People have very justified hatred toward insurance company CEOs because these executives are responsible for an unfathomable amount of death and suffering. I think it’s good to call out this broken system and the people in power who enable it. Again, not so they can be murdered, but so that we can change the system and start holding people in power accountable for their actions.
As ProPublica reported last year, "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. Many people, faced with fighting insurance companies, simply give up: One study found that Americans file formal appeals on only 0.1% of claims denied by insurers under the Affordable Care Act.
Insurers have wide discretion in crafting what is covered by their policies, beyond some basic services mandated by federal and state law. They often deny claims for services that they deem not 'medically necessary'" despite a doctor's orders.
When it comes to denying healthcare coverage, UnitedHealth stands above its competitors. The insurance company denies an average of 32% of claims, double the industry average.
UnitedHealth does this through myriad ways. In one instance, according to a recent lawsuit, it has used a deeply flawed AI algorithm that generates wildly inaccurate predictions in order to deny health coverage to severely ill patients by cutting the time they can spend in extended care. The AI system has a 90% error rate, and yet it remained in use.
These allegations were confirmed by Stat News, which found that UnitedHealth pushed employees to follow an algorithm to cut off Medicare patients’ rehab care.
UnitedHealthcare also recently settled for $15.7 million after being accused of illegally denying coverage for mental health and substance abuse treatments. Federal and state authorities found that the company imposed strict limits on behavioral health care which included the use of algorithms to deny extended care despite clinical justification. Meanwhile, UnitedHealthcare made $8.9 billion in profit through the first three quarters of this year alone.
I urge you to read this gutting investigation into UnitedHealth's well documented pattern of denying vulnerable patients essential treatments arbitrarily, with almost no recourse, simply to maximize profit, and ProPublica’s entire series on the cruelty of the insurance system. “Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,” one insurance agent at a competing insurer explained.
The people who have had their coverage denied by UnitedHealth are not just numbers, these are human beings with lives and families and loved ones. Many of them are elderly, sick and vulnerable.
"Remembering the day United Healthcare denied a one-night hospital stay for my 12 year old child as 'medically unnecessary' following ASD heart repair surgery," one Twitter user posted.
"Today I’m thinking about the time United Healthcare suddenly decided to stop paying for my chemotherapy and didn’t bother telling me, so the nurses had to tell me when I checked in at the cancer center for my next treatment," another person said.
If you watch a loved one die because insurance has denied their life saving treatment as a cost cutting measure, yes, it's natural to wish that the people who run these systems would suffer the same fate.
Instead of centering the stories of those harmed by UnitedHealth and the very real outrage that most Americans feel about the way the healthcare system is run today, the media is publishing a tidal wave of breathless articles about the loss of "civility" and "respect" online.
Have some people’s jokes gone too far? Yes. Are some people being craven and cruel? Yes. Are some people irresponsibly calling for more violence? Yes. But to report on the online commentary surrounding Thompson's death without examining the systemic cruelty of our healthcare system is to willfully strip context from these online outpourings.
All of this is very intentional. The media, and especially journalists at places like Fox News, want you to be outraged at bad Twitter jokes and random heated comments. They want you to direct your anger at random people on Twitter who "took things too far," rather than question the system that led to these conditions in the first place.
And again, that does not mean I condone what many people have posted. I think it's deeply concerning that Americans feel like violence is the only way to get justice in our broken system. I wish the collective anger people are feeling could be channeled into more productive means of resistance that lead to lasting, systemic change.
"Every single person profiting off of and making the decisions that lead to people dying from lack of healthcare would suffer a trial and jail time at the least if we lived in a country with ACTUAL justice, but this is what we get," one social media user posted.
Healthcare, which 8 of 10 Americans feel is a “very important” issue, was treated as afterthought throughout the 2024 election. Biden stripped tens of millions of people of healthcare benefits shortly after he took office. Countless people saw their health insurance coverage rolled back as Democrats rescinded Medicaid expansion, paid sick leave, and increased unemployment benefits that were given at the start of the Covid pandemic. People lost all of these benefits while inflation soared, income stagnated, and poverty increased, The New Republic recently noted.
Instead of issuing mealy mouthed platitudes about civility and scolding social media users for getting emotional about an issue that materially affects their lives, Democrats could recognize the widespread public sentiment surrounding privatized healthcare and push for more progressive policies like universal coverage.
In the meantime, as the journalist Malcolm Harris put it, "[the] every life is precious" stuff about a healthcare CEO whose company is noted for denying coverage is pretty silly."
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Note: this article has been updated to clarify the type of healthcare coverage rolled back under Biden.
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There’s literally no other consequences for these greedy ghouls so yea….we’re not sad. In fact I hope MORE greedy ghouls are nervous and check in with their little grinch heart because of this. Our healthcare system has pushed all of us to an emotional breaking point.
I’m so glad you wrote about this today because it’s ALL I’m thinking about.
I think we're in a weird cultural moment where pearl-clutching has turned into a major pastime for people on both sides. Growing up in the 90's, it seemed like conservatives were the people doing all the pearl clutching over violent music and video games. But now everyone is looking for pearls to clutch because that's the main way you get yourself attention on the internet / from the algorithm? Early on, the pearls being clutched at were valid–stuff like #metoo, and so on. But everyone decided to try to out pearl-clutch each other on the internet, and it's led to a place where any total normal, but slightly ugly human behavior, like, say, being somewhat happy that a capitalist sleaze ball got a hit called on him, is turned into a clutching contest where people compete to see who can make the biggest outsized judgmental statement against the people who dared to experience human emotions in public. It's getting very grating and tiring, and unfortunately I think the tiniest nugget of truth at the center of it for us (assuming we're all left leaning around here) in this situation was what snowballed into the result of the current election for some majority of Americans.
I dunno at what point being an angry anti-capitalist turned into an ugly thing you should hide in the shadows around left-leaning people but it really feels like a lot of people have been tricked into agreeing to a very puritanical worldview where our humanity must be suppressed for the sake of being polite to everybody at all times. No, I want to be human and angry, I want to say "fuck the companies who run this world and fuck the people who profit off the exploitation of others, the world is better off without them" and for it not seem like some sort of radical thing that is going to get me attacked from all sides. What happened to being even a little radical? When did we trade puritanism or apathy for our passion for change?
People who do not practice empathy for others do not deserve sympathy. It's actually ridiculous that this viewpoint seems even a little radical. Yes, he was a human, big deal, the rest of us are too, and no one seems to give a shit.