“Pay Every Claim” Is Not a Viable Model for Any Health Insurance Company
Including the one run by the government
The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has been met with shock, sadness, and, uh…unconstrained glee? Tweets, TikToks, and Facebook posts were overrun with comments along the lines of “LOL thoughts and prayers are OUT OF NETWORK 😂😂😂!!!” Aside from being unbelievably hack, isn’t that also deeply sick? I was recently conflicted about making a joke about John Jacob Astor IV, who died on the Titanic, but clearly I’m the prude here, because other people are fine making jokes about a murder that happened on Wednesday. Here’s a full article about the rage from recently fired Washington Post columnist and noted anti-violence advocate Taylor Lorenz:
Surely, that headline ran afoul of Bluesky’s stringent rules against violent posts, right? Nope.
The argument made by Lorenz and others is that rage — if not necessarily murder — against health care executives is justified because those executives inflict pain and suffering on others. Lorenz writes:
“…thousands of Americans (myself included) are fed up with our barbaric healthcare system and the people at the top who rake in millions while inflicting pain, suffering, and death on millions of innocent people.
If you have watched a loved one die because an insurance conglomerate has denied their life saving treatment as a cost cutting measure, yes, it's natural to wish that the people who run such conglomerates would suffer the same fate.”
This is the same argument often made in favor of the death penalty: The pain and suffering felt by victims’ families justifies a desire for vengeance. And, on some level, all feelings are valid — feelings happen to us, and we can’t control that. But it doesn’t follow that any response to those feelings is justified. And people who suggest that UnitedHealthcare’s denial of claims extenuates violence against its executives aren’t just expressing deep moral confusion: They’re also demonstrating extreme ignorance about how insurance works.