EDITORIAL
CEO Murder:
The Working Class Needs Collective Action

Dec 8, 2024

In the early hours of Wednesday, December 4, as he was walking toward the Manhattan Hilton for a shareholder meeting, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot in the back and killed by an unknown assailant who then escaped.

The perpetrator’s motives for the shooting are not firmly known. But when it was reported that police found several bullet casings with the words “Deny”, “Defend”, and “Depose” written on them, speculation and reaction started pouring in, to social media and elsewhere. For the words echo a phrase, “Delay, deny, defend,” that has been used to describe practices of the health insurance industry to raise its profits at the expense of people in need of healthcare.

Testimonials from UnitedHealthcare customers AND medical professionals started flooding social media sites: People who lost their homes or went deeply into debt to pay off medical bills. People who lost family members because treatment was denied or delayed. Doctors who could not perform life-saving procedures because they had to wait for “prior authorization” from the insurance company before they could do anything. And these came from across the political spectrum, across many diverse backgrounds.

In any case, the election is over. But reality didn’t go away.

And in addition to the testimonials came coarser reactions. Some people expressed glee and satisfaction at this murder, and some even see the murderer as a hero. A lecturer at the Columbia School of Social Work posted on X: “Today we mourn the death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down ... wait, I’m sorry—today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.”

Clearly, this murder touched a nerve. The reaction shows many, many people in this country share similar complaints about health insurance companies and about the healthcare industry as a whole.

UnitedHealthcare brought in 281 billion dollars in revenue last year. It has denied nearly one-third of all claims it receives. It has also deployed computer programs to review—and deny—customer claims immediately. No chance for human intervention. How cold-blooded! Appeals take time, and medical situations can worsen without swift intervention.

UnitedHealthcare is not the only major insurance company to engage in these practices; it is just one of the largest and most egregious. And the insurance companies are not the only perpetrators—the United States healthcare industry is built, from the ground up, for the production of profit above all else, from hospital chains to medical device makers to pharmaceutical companies.

So, people let loose anger at this system when a top executive in that system, a symbol of all that they had been forced through, was gunned down. Such a reaction is understandable, and it demonstrates just how many people feel screwed by the healthcare industry.

But nothing fundamental will change in the healthcare industry from this murder. Individual acts of violence are not a solution to a broad social problem. Thompson will just be replaced by another CEO. UnitedHealthcare, and CEOs across the country, are beefing up their security, while changing absolutely nothing about the profit-making that makes so many people so furious. And in fact, behind the CEOs making millions of dollars are the shareholders, banks and Wall Street making billions.

The only time things change for working people is when we come together in collective action. When we organize collectively with the goal of changing this system and taking control away from the corporations playing with our lives for the sake of their profits and wealth.

But now we can see just how deep the rage goes. And now we can start organizing and using our collective power to build a system that truly serves us.