We should not celebrate the UnitedHealthcare CEO's killing

The justified rage towards a broken healthcare and insurance system should not go as far as to defend cold-blooded murder

I expect many might disagree with what I’m about to say but that’s okay - that’s the entire point of this Substack. Feel free to let me know your thoughts.

The recent murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City has sparked a massive internet reaction, with many comments celebrating his death and hailing his killer as a revolutionary. I myself have seen various memes on Instagram and TikTok conveying the same messages.

These sentiments are not misplaced and I do not want to undermine the very palpable hatred of Americans towards insurers. UnitedHealthcare is our system at its worst - responsible for driving up healthcare costs, denying coverage to millions (now using AI), lobbying extensively for cozy regulation, and raking in billions in profit doing so. This is as evil a corporation as you can get, and their work has contributed to the death of millions of our fellow citizens. You would be hard-pressed to find a single patient, physician, or hospital who has never had a bad experience working with insurers such as UnitedHealthcare. Nearly everyone I know has had some sort of horrific story involving health insurance during a period where they were sick.

Insurance to me is one of the biggest scams in American healthcare - why do we pay a corporate middleman exorbitant premiums every month for a sliver of a chance that they may pay for our treatment if we ever get sick. Time and time again, they have demonstrated that their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders and bottom line exceed any responsibility they have towards their policyholders and keeping them safe. Medical bills continue to be the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US, and companies like UnitedHealthcare are big reason why.

While the police have not been able to confirm the killer’s motive, it is not difficult to see what happened here. The shell casings found at the scene were engraved with the words “deny,” “depose,” and “defend,” possibly referencing a popular book detailing the horrific practices of the health insurance industry. Per his wife, Brian Thompson had been receiving death threats over claim denials for a while. It is likely the killer is a policyholder or family member of a policyholder who was negatively impacted by UnitedHealthcare’s practices. That about narrows the list of suspects down to ~30 million people give or take.

Even though Brian Thompson was public enemy No. 1, that does not mean that we should cheer on someone being murdered in cold blood. His wife is now a widow and his two children are now fatherless. They will continue to suffer for the rest of their lives. Are they to also be made complicit in the actions of their husband’s/father’s company?

We must also understand that the healthcare system is broken in countless ways that negatively effect doctors and patients, not just insurers. Brian Thompson is not the one person responsible for everything wrong with healthcare in America. The long list includes Congress (for poor legislation and acceptance of lobbying efforts), the FDA (for approving drugs and devices with imperfect study), Big Pharma (for charging exorbitant prices themselves), Big Food (for making us sick in the first place), private equity (for monopolization of the market), and a court system that repeatedly takes the side of corporations and provides legal backing for their horrific actions. Some of the blame must also be shouldered by doctors and hospitals for not practicing evidence-based medicine and ordering unneccesary tests and procedures.

It is foolish to assume that murdering this one person will accomplish any sort of real progress towards this multifaceted issue. UnitedHealthcare will simply find a new CEO and will continue to deny claims for their policyholders just as before. Only a bottom-up overhaul of both government and corporate policy regarding the entities I identified above will even have a chance at fixing these problems. I will admit that Aetna did halt a dreadful plan to enforce time limits on insurance coverage of anesthesia during surgery in the wake of this killing. However, there is little stopping them from reversing this in 6 months when the media attention dies down. The only real victims of this crime were simply Brian Thompson’s family.

I am most alarmed by the fact that physicians were among those celebrating the murder online. These are individuals who have committed their life towards helping others. Like me, they all took the Hippocratic Oath and pledged to do no harm on the first day of medical school. Wishing and celebrating someone’s death is a sentiment that to me, flies in the face of that promise. I personally would not want to be treated by a doctor who could harbor these feelings towards any fellow human, regardless of how evil they are.

I would like ask these physicians a question - if the Aetna CEO had some medical event and they were the only doctor around, would they treat them? If the answer is anything but a simple “yes,” I don’t think they joined the right profession. Medicine is a calling that necessitates you to put aside your own personal social and political convictions and even casting aside your moral compass and simply treating the person in front of you as a human being. Someone asked me a while back if I would treat Osama bin Laden if he walked into my hospital. I would. No matter how evil I think someone is, if they are sick and in front of me, I will treat them. The same goes for any serial killer in jail - are we to say that these people are undeserving of medical care?

Another point I want to make - when it comes to excusing people’s extrajudicial murder of any kind, where do we draw the line? Let’s assume UnitedHealthcare’s claim denials were involved in the deaths of 100,000 people during Brian Thompson’s tenure as CEO. We as a society largely deem that he deserved to die. What about a serial killer who killed 10 people? What about a drunk driver who killed 1 person in a car crash. Or perhaps your racist next-door neighbor who threw a rock into your window? If these people were murdered in retribution, did they deserve to die? I argue that the answer likely changes depending on the person - and this is the reason why we have a legal system in place to answer these questions and administer repercussions. Even though it is by no means perfect, it is superior than vigilantism.

Believe me - I personally am not crying any tears over Brian Thompson’s death. But I do not believe that we, especially physicians, should be celebrating this. It is both unproductive towards solving our healthcare issues and morally reprehensible.