The Health Insurance Industry And Legalized Murder

The man who murdered Thompson, for whatever reason, deserves to be punished. But if we’re going to be honest about the public’s utter lack of sympathy, we have to acknowledge that it springs from the legalized murder practiced by all the Brian Thompsons who run the American medical insurance industry. The last thirty-six hours have seen an outpouring of statistics, personal testimony, and news stories that I find perhaps even more coldly upsetting than the footage of the murder. The statistics include UnitedHealthcare having the highest denial rate—32 percent in 2023—of any U.S. insurance company. The personal testimony includes an outraged letter from a pediatric oncologist to UHC about their decision not to cover anti-nausea medication for a child undergoing chemotherapy, and a woman describing how the company claimed that an overnight hospital stay was not “medically necessary” for her twelve-year-old who had just gone through heart surgery. A colleague of mine whose late father was a doctor told me that the man regularly had to fight with the company to get approval for the most routine procedures. UHC was sued last year by the families of two deceased Minnesota patients who claimed the company used an AI bot that routinely denied doctor-approved claims. The plaintiffs alleged the bot had a 90 percent error rate, and that UHC knew that.

Can anyone seriously doubt that Thompson approved this way of business? Not when the company’s 2023 earnings were $371.6 billion, up $47.5 billion from the previous year. How much would the company still have made if they actually provided people the care they promised?

You don’t have to approve of Thompson’s murder to be disgusted by these stories. But I do think you’d have to be more than a little naïve to think that you can, as a matter of policy, deny people healthcare (some of it lifesaving) and bankrupt many of them in the process, all for the express purpose of making money, and not have someone take potentially lethal exception. I can’t pretend to think that the fear Thompson’s murder is causing in the insurance world is a bad thing. Just before I wrote this, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield announced it is abandoning its plan to strictly limit the time it will pay for people having surgery to receive anesthesia. A corporate world that isn’t shy about the sheer arrogance of denying coverage for anesthesia during surgery is not one that incurs sympathy for a dead CEO. That may be why the initial reaction some had to the news that the police had a photo of the shooter’s face and a smudged fingerprint was disappointment.