A Healthcare CEO Died: I Don’t Have It In Me To Care

CCTV of suspect leaving subway station

As you are probably aware, the former CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was gunned down by (as of writing this) a yet-to-be-caught assassin in early December of 2024. The attack was potentially politically motivated, with the words deny, defend, and depose written on the shell casings left behind at the crime scene — a possible reference to the overly litigious (and malicious) tactics used by insurance companies.

The reaction to this killing was, much to the chagrin of centrist pundits everywhere, very positive. Immediately, people posted online celebrations of the murder. “I would offer thoughts and prayers, but I’m gonna need a prior authorization first,” one Reddit user allegedly joked shortly after the incident.

And just as quickly, there were condemnations from the center-right about how such celebrations were obscene. “The callous disregard for a human life is alarming to witness,” laments Ingrid Jacques in the Tennessean. “Slain UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson Was a ‘Good Father’” goes the title of a People article.

Regardless of what you feel on this subject, it’s interesting that this conversation is fundamentally rooted in empathy for the person killed (automatically labeling them a victim) and not even entertaining the reasons that motivated said killing.

A framing that decenters the people Thompson hurt in the equation to tell a sanitized tale of his death.

Who should we care about?

The question of when and where violence is appropriate is largely contextual. From the American War of Independence to the French Revolution, most wars for independence were quite violent, and their appropriateness is continuously debated in retrospect.

Your mileage on violence’s acceptability will vary a lot depending on which institutions you hate and which ones you are keen to preserve.

For example, if you want to preserve the current system in its entirety, you’ll probably be in favor of the violence used by institutions to stop agitators (i.e., cops shooting at and teargassing protestors — a war crime), and vice versa for those who hate the state. There is a context in the background on which violence is acceptable and therefore “normal” and which is supposed to be invisible and ignored.

Fundamentally, the Brian Thompson discourse bothers me because it asks us to discard this context and judge this instance out of time. We are being asked not to unpack the circumstances that led to his death but rather to flatten the violence of this assassin into just a random action that happened. As Ingrid Jacques continues in that article:

“…people are reacting with anger and scorn to the death − not because a husband and father was fatally shot on a Manhattan sidewalk. But because of the victim’s job as head of a major health insurance company.”

Such pundits want to make the assassin’s violence the sole thing that is visible in the conversation.

Yet violence is always done in response to something, even if the only motivations are perceived grievances that do not really exist. Whether or not the violence is justified (it’s often not), the perpetrator is reacting to something in their environment, community, culture, and so forth that compels them to harm others.

Again, in the case of Brian Thompson’s assassin, they were most likely reacting to America’s dysfunctional and problematic healthcare system, specifically the fact that insurance companies frequently refuse to pay for the vital care of sick people. A robust KFF survey found that: “a majority of insured adults (58%) say they have experienced a problem using their health insurance in the past 12 months” — many claims of which were reported as unresolved.

United Healthcare, in particular, has implemented a harsh algorithm to reject claims swiftly. Casey Ross and Bob Herman of Stat News wrote of this problem in 2023:

“The nation’s largest health insurance company pressured its medical staff to cut off payments for seriously ill patients in lockstep with a computer algorithm’s calculations…the algorithm was to be followed precisely so payment could be cut off by the date it predicted.”

The tens of thousands of people who have died (and will continue to die) from decisions like this one — decisions that Brian Thompson had a hand in — are not centered in this conversation. People who die from negligent care often do not garner public outcries when they die but instead suffer violence that is mainly considered invisible. Such people are expected to die quietly, to whither away so those like Brian Thompson can profit from that suffering.

Our current institutions seem to be okay with the weaponized bureaucratic negligence (or violence) insurance companies enact against such people, but somehow, pundits want us to draw a red line toward the violence committed against one of the upholders of this terrible status quo. A calculus I have trouble wrapping my head around.

It’s always the rich who deserve empathy and never the countless people being f@cked over by them.

A sick conclusion

I don’t know if the violence committed against Brian Thompson was wrong — I don’t think that question is for me alone to answer — but I do know that how many pundits are having this conversation is woefully one-sided. Brian Thompson’s death did not happen in a vacuum; it was a reaction to actions he helped perpetuate. To harm he brought into this world.

And if that’s not going to be acknowledged, I don’t think I have it in me to care about his death.

The thing about our system is that it already forces us to limit our empathy. We pass dying people on the street all the time, and many do nothing because the dysfunction of our current system is too overwhelming for a single individual to grapple with. We don’t have the spoons (see spoon theory) to care, so sometimes we don’t, contributing ever so slightly to another person’s suffering.

Again, people are dying around me every day — so much so that I sometimes have to numb myself to get through it— and yet, in this discourse, I am being asked to stretch that limited supply of empathy to a rich man who perpetrated others’ suffering so he could live a good life.

Frankly, I don’t have the mental bandwidth to do so, especially since it’s a double standard not being returned by the rich. Many of the Brian Thompsons of the world do not empathize with the people they hurt — as they consider their violence to be natural and invisible. It's only when that violence is turned around on them that we are suddenly supposed to care.

And so, no, the rich do not get my empathy. A violent assassin killed a healthcare CEO, and I do not have any compassion left to give, and I don’t think I will for the next rich man, either.