The CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was killed in broad daylight on the curb outside the Hilton in Midtown. A man wearing a hoodie — identified by the New York City Police Department as Luigi Mangione — is suspected to have fired three shots, with each shell casing marked with a word: deny, delay, defend.
Perhaps more shocking than the death itself has been the public reaction to it. Rather than condolences for the Thompson family, the prevailing attitude towards the affair has overwhelmingly been public outrage at the health care system and sympathy for Mangione. It’s clear this crime has touched on a much deeper, growing dissatisfaction with health care in the United States.
Callous reactions online to the shooting have surprised members of mainstream media. The contrast between the shared suffering of the public and the affluence of the victim has created a uniquely revealing outcome. From the everyday social media user commenting on the situation to published authors reflecting on it, social media feeds have been flooded with heartwrenching stories of claim denials from insurance companies. Exorbitant deductibles, denied claims, money spent and loved ones lost are common sentiments, revealing a festering anger underneath the surface of our current health care system.
As one Tiktok comment noted, “I pay $1,300 a month for health insurance with an $8,000 deductible. When I finally reached that deductible, they denied my claims. He [Thompson] was making a million dollars a month.”
This bitter reaction was not a fluke. The shooting was a dam break, exposing the growing anger and betrayal Americans feel towards their health care system.
Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States, devastating families, leading to financial instability and the loss of assets like cars and homes. An alarming 41% of Americans are in some form of medical debt, according to a 2022 study.
For years, whistleblowers have exposed how many insurers systemically delay and deny coverage to patients, even when they are in need of urgent or life-saving care. Stories of these denied claims have become painfully personal for so many who have had to watch their loved ones experience unnecessary suffering. Many people view UnitedHealthcare’s CEO as a symbol of corporate greed, who has been indirectly responsible for the deaths of thousands.
Recently, many insurers like UnitedHealthcare, have employed artificial intelligence systems to rapidly deny claims, often without even viewing the patient’s medical chart. For example, the insurer Cigna Healthcare was subject to an investigation that found they used an automated system called PXDX which allowed medical reviewers to sign off on 50 charts in 10 seconds, often without even reading them. UnitedHealthcare is in the lead in terms of denying claims.
While health care is undoubtedly a significant political issue for many Americans, it’s taken the backseat in public debate for the better part of the past decade. When health care does enter the public conversation, it’s often reduced to partisan buzzwords like “socialism” or “Obamacare,” which oversimplify the much larger issue — our health care system prioritizes profits over patients. A single-payer health care system, where health care is provided by a central non-private authority like the kind employed by the United Kingdom, is rarely, if ever, mentioned in American public debate. Despite the wealth of written material on how a single-payer health care system does not constitute socialism, it seems like the idea of the government paying for health care has been conflated with socialism too much to maintain broad appeal. This is despite the fact that we already use a single-payer health care system in Medicare, which you would be hard-pressed to find a fault in.
In data collected over the past five years, 40% percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe that it is the government’s responsibility to ensure access to health care — up from 31%. Within that, 56% of low-income Republicans believe it is the government’s responsibility, something higher-income Republicans are much more likely to disagree with. About a quarter of low-income Republicans even support a single-payer health care system, showing the greater proportion of conservatives see health care less as a partisan issue and more as a quality-of-life one. Despite their other ideological divides, Americans are increasingly united by the belief that health care is a right.
The wave of support for broader access to health care has even caused President-elect Donald Trump to both backtrack his position on repealing Obamacare and deny he ever took that position in the first place. More blatantly than perhaps ever before, this new administration is filled with CEOs and business leaders, uniformly committed to deregulation and cost-cutting. The American people will suffer as a result of this directive, as we remove protections and health care benefits so the government can save money, money that will just flow somewhere deemed more important. Only time will tell whether the American people will continue to support these business leaders, or whether this shooting will make them view the situation in a different light.
The shock of the shooting has already caused ripples in the health care world. Days before the shooting, Blue Cross Blue Shield Healthcare announced a new policy to introduce a time limit on the amount of anesthesia they would cover. Shortly after the killing of Thompson, they halted that policy.
The ability to live shouldn’t exist behind a paywall. Thompson’s death, and the upheaval it sparked, should serve as a wake-up call. It was a manifestation of collective anger against a system that is fundamentally exploitative. It betrays the promise to heal and actively harms the people who pay them. The public’s anger isn’t going away, and neither is the growing demand for systemic change. If health insurance companies and lawmakers continue to ignore this frustration, they risk more than just bad public relations. Without fundamentally rethinking our health care more lives will be lost — not just from violent acts such as this shooting, but from a system that devalues human life with every passing day.
WSN’s Opinion section strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion section are solely the views of the writer.
Contact Mehr Kotval and Noah Zaldivar at [email protected].