{"id":823383,"date":"2025-01-31T12:12:30","date_gmt":"2025-01-31T18:12:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/31\/what-the-murder-of-the-unitedhealthcare-c-e-o-means-to-america\/"},"modified":"2025-01-31T12:12:30","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T18:12:30","slug":"what-the-murder-of-the-unitedhealthcare-c-e-o-means-to-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/31\/what-the-murder-of-the-unitedhealthcare-c-e-o-means-to-america\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Murder of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Means to America"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As you know, the C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare, fifty-year-old Brian Thompson, was murdered on the street in midtown Manhattan, on Wednesday morning, twenty minutes before sunrise. He was in town for an investors\u2019 convention, and had worked for UnitedHealthcare for more than two decades\u2014a company that is part of UnitedHealth Group, a health-insurance conglomerate valued at five hundred and sixty billion dollars. UnitedHealthcare had two hundred and eighty-one billion dollars in revenue in 2023, and Thompson, who became C.E.O. in 2021, had raised annual profits from twelve billion dollars to sixteen billion dollars during his tenure. He received more than ten million dollars in compensation last year. Andrew Witty, the C.E.O. of UnitedHealth Group, remembered Thompson in a video message to employees as a \u201ctruly extraordinary person who touched the lives of countless people throughout our organization and far beyond.\u201d Thompson lived in a suburb of Minneapolis, where UnitedHealthcare is based, and he is survived by his wife and two sons.<\/p>\n

The particulars of this murder are strange and remarkable: it occurred in public; the suspected shooter went to Starbucks beforehand; he got away from the scene via bicycle; he has not yet been found. But the public reaction has been even wilder, even more lawless. The jokes came streaming in on every social-media platform, in the comments underneath every news article. \u201cI\u2019m sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers,\u201d someone commented on TikTok, a response that got more than fifteen thousand likes. \u201cDoes he have a history of shootings? Denied coverage,\u201d another person wrote, under an Instagram post from CNN. On X, someone posted<\/a>, with the caption \u201cMy official response to the UHC CEO\u2019s murder,\u201d an infographic comparing wealth distribution in late eighteenth-century France to wealth distribution in present-day America. The whiff of populist anarchy in the air is salty, unprecedented, and notably across the aisle. New York Post<\/em> comment sections are full of critiques of capitalism as well as self-enriching executives and politicians (like \u201cBiden and his crime family\u201d). On LinkedIn, where users post with their real names and employment histories, UnitedHealth Group had to turn off comments on its post about Thompson\u2019s death\u2014thousands of people were liking and hearting it, with a few even giving it the \u201cclapping\u201d reaction. The company also turned off comments on Facebook, where, as of midday Thursday, a post about Thompson had received more than thirty-six thousand \u201claugh\u201d reactions.<\/p>\n

What on earth, some people must be asking, is happening to our country? Are we really so divided, so used to dehumanizing one another, that people are out here openly celebrating the cold-blooded murder of a hardworking family man? That people are making jokes about how the assassin could\u2019ve won the Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet look-alike contest in Washington Square Park? That when a journalist at the American Prospect<\/em> called<\/a> an eighty-eight-year-old woman who was aggravated by her poor Medicare Advantage coverage for comment, she wisecracked that she wasn\u2019t the killer\u2014she can\u2019t even ride a bike?<\/p>\n

There had been prior threats against Thompson, his wife told<\/a> NBC News, motivated, she said, by, \u201cI don\u2019t know, a lack of coverage?\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I just know that he said there were some people that had been threatening him.\u201d There had been protests at the UnitedHealthcare headquarters, in Minnesota, in April and July; during the latter, eleven people were arrested. The group responsible for the protests, People\u2019s Action, also confronted Witty, the UnitedHealth Group C.E.O., at a Senate hearing in May. In a statement, People\u2019s Action leaders referenced endless hours on the phone trying to get medical care covered, and denials of coverage for lifesaving medication and surgery. A recent statement<\/a> from the group, in response to Thompson\u2019s death, read, \u201cWe know there is a crisis of gun violence in America. There is also a crisis of denials of care by private health insurance corporations including UnitedHealth.\u201d They urged political leaders to \u201cact on both.\u201d UnitedHealthcare has the highest claim-denial rate of any private insurance company: at thirty-two per cent, it is double the industry average. And, though the shooter\u2019s motive remains unknown, shell casings found on the scene had the words \u201cdeny,\u201d \u201cdelay,\u201d and possibly \u201cdepose\u201d written on them, echoing the title of a 2010 book by Jay M. Feinman, \u201cDelay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don\u2019t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It<\/a>,\u201d which by Thursday had leapt up one of Amazon\u2019s best-seller charts.<\/p>\n

To most Americans, a company like UnitedHealth represents less the provision of medical care than an active obstacle to receiving it. UnitedHealthcare insures almost a third of the patients enrolled in Medicare Advantage, a government-funded program facilitated by private insurance companies, which receive a flat fee for each patient they cover and then produce their own profits by minimizing each patient\u2019s care costs. Reporting<\/a> in the Wall Street Journal<\/em> has found that these private insurance companies, which cover more than a third of American seniors on Medicare, collect hundreds of billions of dollars from the government annually and overbill Medicare to the tune of around ten billion dollars per year; UnitedHealthcare has used litigation<\/a> to fight its obligation to repay fees that were overpaid. In 2020, UnitedHealth acquired a company called NaviHealth, whose software provides algorithmic care recommendations for sick patients, and which is now used to help manage its Medicare Advantage program. A 2023 class-action lawsuit alleges that the NaviHealth algorithm has a \u201cknown error rate\u201d of ninety per cent and cites appalling patient stories: one man in Tennessee broke his back, was hospitalized for six days, was moved to a nursing home for eleven days, and then was informed by UnitedHealth that his care would be cut off in two days. (UnitedHealth says the lawsuit is unmerited.) After a couple rounds of appeals and reversals, the man left the nursing home and died four days later. The company has denied requests to release the analyses behind NaviHealth\u2019s conclusions to patients and doctors, stating that the information is proprietary.<\/p>\n

At the same time that news was breaking about the NaviHealth algorithm, the company was fighting\u2014ultimately unsuccessfully\u2014a court decision that it had acted \u201carbitrarily and capriciously<\/a>\u201d in repeatedly denying coverage of long-term residential treatment to a middle-school-age girl who repeatedly attempted suicide, and has since died by suicide. Several years ago, government investigators found<\/a> that UnitedHealth had used algorithms to identify mental-health-care providers who they believed were treating patients too often; these identified therapists would typically receive a call from a company \u201ccare advocate\u201d who would question them and then cut off reimbursements. Though some states have ruled this practice illegal, it remains in play across the country. There is no single regulator for a private health-insurance company, even when it is found to be violating the law. For United\u2019s practices to be curbed, mental-health advocates told<\/a> ProPublica, every single jurisdiction in which it operates would have to successfully bring a case against it.<\/p>\n

Thompson\u2019s murder is one symptom of the American appetite for violence; his line of work is another. Denied health-insurance claims are not broadly understood this way, in part because people in consequential positions at health-insurance companies, and those in their social circles, are likely to have experienced denied claims mainly as a matter of extreme annoyance at worst: hours on the phone, maybe; a bunch of extra paperwork; maybe money spent that could\u2019ve gone to next year\u2019s vacation. For people who do not have money or social connections at hospitals or the ability to spend weeks at a time on the phone, a denied health-insurance claim can instantly bend the trajectory of a life toward bankruptcy and misery and death. Maybe everyone knows this, anyway, and structural violence\u2014another term for it is \u201csocial injustice\u201d\u2014is simply, at this point, the structure of American life, and it is treated as normal, whether we attach that particular name to it or not.<\/p>\n

The Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung coined the term \u201cstructural violence\u201d in 1969, in a paper<\/a> that offers a taxonomy of violence\u2014ways to distinguish between the forms that violence can take. It can be physical or psychological. It can be positive, enacted through active reward, or negative, enacted through punishment. It can hurt an object, or not; this object can be human, or not. There is either\u2014Galtung notes that this is the most important distinction\u2014a person who acts to commit the violence or there is not. Violence can be intended or unintended. It can be manifest, or latent. Traditionally, our society fixates on only one version of this: direct physical violence committed by a person intending harm. The pretty girl killed by a boyfriend, the C.E.O. shot on the street, the subway dancer strangled by the ex-marine. You don\u2019t even need a human object\u2014people are generally more troubled by the Zoomers throwing soup<\/a> at paintings in a weird bid to raise attention about climate change than by the more than ten thousand farmers in India who die by suicide every year in part because of the way erratic and extreme weather renders their debts insurmountable. If one were to, hypothetically, blow up an unoccupied private jet in protest of the fact that the wealthiest one per cent of the global population accounts for more carbon emissions than the poorest sixty-six per cent, this would be seen by many people\u2014like Thompson\u2019s murder, and unlike the tens of thousands of human deaths per year already caused by climate change\u2014as a sign of profoundly alarming social decay.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On this point, though, everyone\u2019s really in agreement. It\u2019s just a matter of where you locate the decay\u2014in the killing, or in the response to it, or in what led us here. The only way to end up in a situation where a C.E.O. of a health-insurance company is reflexively viewed as a dictatorial purveyor of suffering is through a history of socially sanctioned death. A person who posted on Reddit\u2019s r\/nurses forum, whose profile describes her as an I.C.U. nurse, wrote, \u201cHonestly, I\u2019m not wishing anyone harm, but when you\u2019ve spent so much time and made so much money by increasing the suffering of the humanity around you, it\u2019s hard for me to summon empathy that you died. I\u2019m sure someone somewhere is sad about this. I am following his lead of indifference.\u201d Reading this, I thought about the statistic, from 2018, that health-care workers account for seventy-three per cent of all nonfatal workplace injuries due to violence. Nurses, residents, aides, specialists\u2014they are asked to absorb the rage and panic induced by the American health-care system, whose private insurers generate billions of dollars in profit and pay executives eight figures not despite but because of the fact that they routinely deny care to desperate people in need.<\/p>\n

Of course, the solution, in the end, can\u2019t be indifference\u2014not indifference to the death of the C.E.O., and not the celebration of it, either. But who\u2019s going to drop their indifference first? At this point, it\u2019s not going to be the people, who have a lifetime of evidence that health-insurance C.E.O.s do not care about their well-being. Can the C.E.O. class drop its indifference to the suffering and death of ordinary people? Is it possible to do so while achieving record quarterly profits for your stakeholders, in perpetuity?<\/p>\n

Thompson\u2019s death resurfaced some unsavory details about his industry. We learned, for instance, that Thompson was one of several UnitedHealth executives under investigation by the D.O.J. for accusations of insider trading. (He had sold more than fifteen million dollars\u2019 worth of company stock in February, shortly before it became public that the Department of Justice was investigating the company for antitrust violations, which caused the stock price to drop.) A new policy from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield also went viral: the company had announced that, in certain states, starting in 2025, it would no longer pay for anesthesia if a surgery passed a pre-allotted time limit. The cost of the \u201cextra\u201d anesthesia would be passed from Anthem\u2014whose year-over-year net income was reported, in June, to have increased by more than twenty-four per cent, to $2.3 billion\u2014to the patient. On Thursday, the company withdrew the change in response to the public outrage, if only in Connecticut, for now. It\u2019s hard not to be curious about what, if anything, might happen to UnitedHealthcare\u2019s claim-denial rates. I was at a show in midtown Manhattan on Thursday night, and when the comedians onstage cracked a joke about the shooter the entire place erupted in cheers. \u2666<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Jia Tolentino
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As you know, the C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare, fifty-year-old Brian Thompson, was murdered on the street in midtown Manhattan, on Wednesday morning, twenty minutes before sunrise. He was in town for an investors\u2019 convention, and had worked for UnitedHealthcare for more than two decades\u2014a company that is part of UnitedHealth Group, a health-insurance conglomerate valued at<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":823384,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2593,93481],"tags":[15665,103621],"class_list":{"0":"post-823383","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-murder","8":"category-unitedhealthcare","9":"tag-murder","10":"tag-unitedhealthcare"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=823383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823383\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/823384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=823383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=823383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=823383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}