Some Businesses Shouldn’t Be Businesses
What health insurance, prisons, and schools have in common
This week’s internet contretemps concerns the assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare. The killer, who, as I write this, has not yet been apprehended, wrote the words “delay,” deny,” and perhaps “depose” on the bullets that he used to kill Thompson. It was an apparent reference to the strategy that health insurance companies like United Healthcare use to minimize the claims they pay and therefore maximize their profits. This was a murder meant to send a message.
The circumstances of the killing were striking — the killer laid in wait outside a meeting site in a busy part of Manhattan, shot Thompson, and then disappeared without much of a trace into the city. What happened next on social media was equally extraordinary: thousands of people took evident delight in the murder of a fellow human being. Some people made jokes like “thoughts and prayers are out of network,” a few apparently lusted after security photos of the killer, and many shared painful personal stories of medical bankruptcies, denied treatments, or exhausting battles with insurance company bureaucracies.
The message, in some corners of the internet, at least, was that Thompson deserved to be killed, or at least that we shouldn’t be too…
