You don't have to be sad when a serial killer dies

Yes, health insurance CEOs are serial killers

It should go without saying that murder is a bad thing, and that the children of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson deserve our sympathy. But everyone pearl-clutching about Thompson’s death at the hands of an unknown assassin kicking off a flurry of memes skewering the health insurance industry needs to take a deep breath.

If you added up the victims of all of history’s worst serial killers — from Jack the Ripper to H.H. Holmes, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy — and even included the names of victims of the worst mass shootings like Columbine, Las Vegas, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and countless others, it wouldn’t even come close to the number of people the health insurance industry kills every year by denying claims for life-saving healthcare.

In 2020, respected medical journal The Lancet published a study finding that if the United States had universal healthcare, it would not only save 68,000 lives every year, but would also save American taxpayers approximately $450 billion annually. This is a polite and academic way of saying that the private health insurance industry is a deeply evil and parasitic institution that needlessly kills tens of thousands of people and bleeds taxpayers dry by serving as a superfluous gatekeeper between Americans and life-saving healthcare. This is helpful context to some of the more biting responses on social media in response to Thompson’s murder, like: “Prior authorization needed for condolences,” and “thoughts and premiums” and “sympathy is out of network.”

UnitedHealth in particular is one of the worst offenders when it comes to insurance claim denials. LendingTree’s ValuePenguin found that UnitedHealth’s denial rate of 32% is not only the highest in the industry, but actually doubles the industry average of 16%. And an Arstechnica report from 2023 found that UnitedHealth actually used AI to automatically deny claims even though it had a 90% error rate.

Even though the health insurance industry’s actual claim denial numbers are — for obvious reasons – not public knowledge, it can be safely assumed that the number of people who died as a result of these denials is more than zero. And because UnitedHealth has 52 million customers, this means it is not an inaccuracy to state that Brian Thompson directly profited from the deaths of perhaps double-digit thousands of people as its CEO.

We’re conditioned to think of the decisions made by business leaders and politicians as dollars and cents, rather than life or death. But as journalist Luke O’Neil of the fantastic “Welcome to Hell World” Substack wrote in 2021, the people who represent us in government make decisions every day that result in the deaths of thousands of people, as he demonstrated when some lawmakers were arguing for Covid-19 safety net programs to be eliminated:

Almost every single utterance from a Republican (and plenty from Democrats) about their intended policy is an attempt to set violence against real people into motion by someone else's hands which is ok for some reason. Arguing that we can’t afford to send out $2,000 checks a month is in fact calling for people to die it’s just said with the cover of the savvy politics insider.

It's weird that we all know this but it's so obvious we just kind of let it pass. Even writing it out here feels kind of pointless.

Technically denying life saving and desperately needed money to people during a pandemic isn't killing them in the same way that shooting them would be it's just inserting the ball into the Rube Goldberg machine of pain that provides an exonerating and distancing sleight of hand between cause and effect. Invoking “the deficit” is just saying “let them die” in more acceptable terms.

Of course, there are valid counter-arguments proliferating in response to the celebratory memes. Vigilante justice is indeed a two-edged sword that can cut both ways if we turn Thompson’s murderer into a martyr. And it’s true that one dead CEO will just be replaced with another who will do the exact same things. But it could also be argued that Thompson’s death is already causing reverberations in the health insurance world and yielding immediate changes in how these parasitic companies do business.

One key example is Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield abruptly reversing its policy of not paying for anesthesia if a surgery goes beyond an arbitrary time limit. Just a little over 24 hours after Thompson was shot to death in broad daylight, the company announced that actually, it would be providing full anesthesia coverage (at least in Connecticut).

I think we can all agree that wanton bloodshed is not a solution for positive change. But at the same time, I think we can all agree it’s healthy for society’s richest and most powerful people to be a little more afraid of us and act accordingly.