'Our Thoughts And Prayers Are Out Of Network': Americans React To The Murder Of A Healthcare CEO
It might just be a sign that people have been pushed too far.
By and large, most people are pretty good about not cheering for anyone’s death — if not for reasons of tact, then at least for reasons of not wanting to inadvertently curse oneself or any loved ones. But there are some notable exceptions. For instance, people were pretty delighted when Henry Kissinger finally kicked it.
Yesterday, UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot in broad daylight. I wouldn’t say that people were necessarily happy that he was murdered (okay, maybe some people were happy), but I would say that a fairly large number of them were conspicuously not sad about it. Certainly, no one was really straining to imagine what the motive could possibly be. After all, while all health insurance companies are pretty evil, UnitedHealth bears the distinction of being the health insurance company most likely to deny claims.
Thompson was one of the highest paid executives in the business, with compensation totaling over $10 million a year. His net worth was estimated to be somewhere around $42.9 million. Perhaps more notably, there have been at least 10 articles with headlines along the lines of “What was Brian Thompson’s net worth?” since yesterday, suggesting that a lot of people have been looking for that particular information.
Thompson was also under investigation by the Department of Justice for insider trading, as he and UnitedHealth Group chairman Stephen Helmsley, Chief People Officer Erin McSweeney, and Chief Accounting Officer Tom Roos sold a combined $101 million in stocks just prior to the company being investigated for violating antitrust laws. He was also sued for this by a firefighter’s pension fund earlier this year.
Here is just a small selection of the responses on TikTok to an ABC News video on the shooting:
“My thought and prayers are unfortunately out of network.”
“Claims for thoughts and prayers are denied at this time…. Hospital he was taken to is not in network and ambulance will not covered due to no prior referral.”
“Sad, now I have to go back to figuring out how to pay for chemotherapy.”
“Sending thoughts and prayers to that poor man…I sure hope he gets away.”
“I guess lead wasn't covered under his policy. That's another 250 a month.”
“What did United Healthcare do to the man for him to go to this extent????”
Those are just the comments from one article. There are about a thousand (million?) other responses on social media saying more or less the same things. It’s not because people are cruel and uncaring so much as they are hurt and they are angry. They are furious — fairly — at a system where this motherfucker is raking in $10.2 million a year to run a company that puts people in debt for getting sick.
I’m sorry, but it’s true. It’s obvious! If we weren’t getting totally fucked over in this system, Brian Thompson would not have been making $10 million a year, because all of that $10 million would have gone towards paying for people’s health care. Health insurance companies draw a profit by taking your money and not giving it back to you when you need it. That is the whole system! That is how it works!
It’s become increasingly clear that people were correct in assuming that the motive had something to do with the shooter or someone they love being denied care. Words like “deny,” “delay,” “defend,” and “depose” were reportedly written on the bullets — a clear reference to the ways insurance companies try to get out of paying claims. In fact, there is even a book titled Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.
I’d like you all to take a moment and go back in time with me to 2020, when all of the sneering pundits who considered themselves the “adults in the room” demanded to know how Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders expected to pay for their Medicare for All plans. And I’m going to tell you that Elizabeth Warren’s plan was estimated to cost $20 trillion over the next decade and Bernie Sanders’ plan (in which all healthcare would be free at the point of service) would have cost $32 trillion over the next decade Then, I’m going to tell you that, in 2023, Americans spent, in total, $4.8 trillion on healthcare. Is $48 trillion over over the next decade (a low estimate, by the way, given the rising costs of healthcare) more than $20 trillion over ten years? Is it more than $32 trillion over ten years? I am not a math expert, but I’m going to say that it is.
I’m also going to point out that one of the biggest benefits of Medicare for All is that not is there no need for $10 or so million be carved out to pay CEOs like Brian Thompson (each), but that no one needs to pay anyone to figure out how not to give people their money back, either!
One survey found that a quarter of Americans say they didn’t call an ambulance in an emergency because they couldn’t afford it — which is not surprising given that the average ambulance ride costs in between $940 and $1300. And that’s just the beginning. People often get the worst news of their life accompanied by the news that it will also financially devastate them or their family.
A search for “UnitedHealth cancer” on GoFundMe turned up myriad pleas from desperate people who had been told their chemo meds were not covered, or that their doctor or hospital had recently become “out of network,” or that they had to pay an extremely high deductible before they could get any coverage.
It’s not just UnitedHealth that is appalling, of course. This week, Anthem BlueCross BlueShield announced that — and I am not making this up — they will not cover anesthesia past a certain time. This means that if something goes wrong with your surgery or the doctors just need a little bit more time for you than for someone else, for whatever reason, than the insurance company itself has deemed necessary for your operation, they will not pay for your anesthesia. This means that your options would be to pay a whole lot of money for anesthesia or to, I guess, have your anesthesia cut-off mid-operation — the latter of which, I would imagine, would make for a lot of deeply unpleasant open-heart surgeries.
It takes a lot, I think, for people to break the “don’t speak ill of the dead” taboo — so while killing is never justified, it’s certainly worth considering that things must be pretty goddamned bad out there for people to feel this way, to be pushed that far. That needs to be taken more seriously.
It’s nice to think that we have a social safety net because we genuinely care about people, and for many of us that’s true. But the fact is, there is a reason why the most famous fictional account of the French Revolution was titled Les Miserables — and it is, in part, because people only have so much of a threshold for misery before the unreasonable starts to sound reasonable. We have a social safety net in order to keep things from getting to the point of guillotines.
As much as people like to roll their eyes and accuse those of us who believe that healthcare is a human right of being naïve and idealistic, the true naïve idealists out there are the ones who actually believe that this can go on forever without consequence.
12/5/24 4:31pm: Adjusted paragraph to make it clear that $48 trillion is not a typo, because I am referring to $4.8 trillion a year for ten years. Which would be $48 trillion.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
The other health insurance CEOs will change their ways after this!
No, they won’t stop denying claims, don’t be silly. I mean they’ll hire more security.
Even the conservative subreddit, a group of people I vastly disagree with, was like “welp, I get it.” When you get those neckbeards and the leftists to agree on your death, you really fucked up.