Opinion: A CEO is Killed and an Angry Public Reacts

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

Brian Thompson, the CEO of United HealthCare, was murdered while preparing for a day of business meetings in New York City.

As tragic as any murder of an innocent victim is, that’s not the news story here.

America’s big cities – not just the giants like NYC, Chicago, and L.A., but the smaller big cities too, all those metropolises that have been ruled by Democrat one-party rule for generations, like Memphis, Milwaukee, and Norfolk – have been murder capitals for decades. In a nation in which the murder rate across the board is only about 7.5 per 100,000 residents, our big cities have double that, or even triple or quadruple such numbers.

So, for there to be a murder in New York City is – tragically – not surprising at all.

What is surprising is what happened in the aftermath.

The mainstream press covered the murder as one would expect – reporting on the victim, his company, his circumstances, and the state of the investigation and pursuit of the suspect.

Followers of social media, however, were shocked to see a thread of vitriol that was, to put it mildly, utterly foreign to the American spirit.

Social media has been overwhelmed since the murder with a barrage of clearly serious rejoicing at this innocent man’s death, as if their every problem was caused by their health insurance plan.

Health insurance is a business, a particularly challenging one by nature. Sensible readers know that health insurance is a sort of brilliant economic mash-up – a capitalist cross between gambling, charity, and rainy day savings account.

The United States are blessed with many of the best doctors, nurses, and medical equipment on earth, all of which would be too expensive for 98% of sick Americans to ever afford when they need it. Health insurance exists to make all these medical wonders available to virtually everyone.

For the math to work, the whole country has to participate, both employers and employees alike, so it’s awfully complex and awfully expensive. But as a result, most horrible diagnoses that would have been a death sentence a century ago are controllable, survivable, even downright beatable today.

Health insurance companies make that possible.

This reality was nowhere to be found in the days and weeks following Brian Thompson’s murder.

Instead, Americans were confronted by displays of hatred at every turn. Internet memes, facebook posts, even a hacked Seattle traffic sign, appeared with such pithy – and vicious – wording as “One Less CEO, Many More To Go.”

The United States of America – a nation founded on the free market, the land of opportunity where diligence can produce economic success – is now awash in class warfare, and in particular, a targeted, carefully-directed hatred against the health insurance business.

This isn’t entirely new. The American Left has hated the health insurance business for generations, because it works so much better than their preferred method – nationalized healthcare.

We can compare the American experience with that of Britain, Canada or Cuba, and the American advantage is undeniable: Those countries either offer lousy care for free, or no care at all for free because patients can’t get an appointment until after their death. With the American method, the patient pays a portion of the cost, but actually gets into the hospital in time to be treated. A worthwhile compromise.

If our schools taught economics, the public would be able to appreciate the different levels of success in America’s different approaches. Medicaid is the most like nationalized healthcare, so it’s the worst and the one most rife with corruption. PPOs are the closest to the free market, so they have higher cost but infinitely better service. Medicare is a cross between the two, so its costs and satisfaction are similarly midrange.

Objective study of our health financing options is a rewarding experience, but unfortunately, there’s relatively little such objective study going on today.

Instead, upon the death of Brian Thompson, social media posters flooded their friends’ newsfeeds with reports of their hospital bills, their copays, their denials of coverage, their medication invoices. Everything that has gone wrong with them, they blame on the insurance companies.

Not to say that these maladies aren’t real, of course. People suffer horrible illnesses and injuries every day. These medical crises cause genuine pain and have real costs. The problem isn’t imaginary.

But shouldn’t we expect a broader allocation of blame? People get cancer, cirrhosis, emphysema, broken bones, concussions, gunshot wounds. All these things have different causes, from smoking to drinking to drug abuse, from muggings to automobile crashes, from genetic weakness to bad luck. Sometimes the fault lies with another human being, sometimes it’s nobody’s fault, just the luck of the draw.

And there are so many people involved in the decisions. Your employer negotiates coverage levels with the insurance company. The insurance company negotiates services with the hospitals. The government mandates that insurance covers (and therefore costs) more than it needs to, and the government allows all those illegal alien drug dealers and uninsured motorists into the country, and the government sets convicted drunk drivers free, and sets convicted muggers free, and sets convicted drug dealers free, to commit the same crimes again and again. And again.

But does the understandable American fury at all of the above get appropriately targeted at the responsible parties? No. Judging from the weeks since the murder of Brian Thompson, it’s all targeted at the insurance companies today.

This should be a wake-up call.

The Democrats’ war on health insurance, brought to the fore during the Clinton and Obama regimes, has been an intentional, manufactured anger, designed for the very political purpose of trying to nationalize the healthcare industry. Today’s Democrats see thousands of hospitals and clinics, medical schools and nursing schools, and millions of hardworking, sometimes well-paid, workers in that industry. Democrats positively salivate at the idea of controlling, regulating, unionizing such a demographic.

That was the goal of the failed Hillarycare push of the 1990s, and was again the goal of the tragically successful Obamacare push of 2009-2010. If you can’t nationalize a seventh of the economy, at least unionize it. And then keep going back to the well, until nationalization happens.

That’s where we are today. Generations of demonization of the health insurance industry have led far too many Americans to misdirect their anger. Even when one has legitimate gripes, the pop culture has pushed people to direct this anger at the wrong target.

And that’s only partly because they want people to hate the insurance industry, a business famous for its entrepreneurship and corporate efficiency. It’s also because they don’t want people to think about the other possible causes for their problems.

If you were injured in a car crash by an uninsured illegal alien, your anger should be directed at the uninsured motorist, and at the politicians who opened up the border to let the gatecrasher in.

Can’t have that.

If you were financially ruined by your son or daughter or brother and their multiple stints in rehab, after being roped into a life of crime and drug abuse by the pushers and drug gangs run by South American cartels, your anger should be directed at the politicians who happily allow those gangs to ply their trade, and refuse to lock them up.

Can’t have that.

Even the tragedies that can’t possibly be blamed on anyone else, because they’re just the result of bad luck or bad genes, get blamed on the health insurance market too, not because it makes any sense, but because the Left doesn’t want Americans accepting personal responsibility; they want Americans angry at the insurance companies.

The ultimate expression of this engineered hatred? An innocent man is on a business trip in New York, and he’s murdered in cold blood just for doing his job. And all over the country, brainwashed people take the side of the homicidal maniac who pulled the trigger.

That’s the real result of generations of Democrat propaganda. It warps its audience; it robs people of their humanity. It makes Americans unamerican.

May Divine Providence watch over us; our country has indeed fallen far, and needs His guiding hand.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo