So the UnitedHealthCare CEO got got

He died from a de-existing condition.

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Last week, Americans woke up to the news that a health insurance CEO was assassinated in broad daylight in Midtown Manhattan and the suspect is still at large. Over the following days, the Aaron Rupar types in the media, all poised tonally somewhere between their customary arch expertisery and a classically wonkish contempt for the uncouth, figured out a way to get firmly and even defiantly on the wrong side of it all. In a slew of transparently strained attempts at moral superiority, they engaged in some absolute fucking hall monitor behavior in what is honestly not a working binary. “Absolutely depraved to get your dunks in when the guy was just murdered in cold blood,” is just one example of Rupar’s mournful tweets about the death of the CEO of a rapacious health insurance company. These sufficiently strident and contemptuous takes from civility dorks struggled to exert a gravitational pull on the general public. In this case, all this ah-hmm’ing and commodified offense-taking flailed against a backdrop of catastrophic healthcare failure and a united disdain for C-suiters like Brian Thompson.

The toxic abstraction and deep denial that define contemporary American politics have not fully fallen away, but this roaring and endless present has finally brought us to one reprieve of bipartisanship. Not since 9/11 has the entire American population been galvanized behind one guy; everyone from Mexican Groyper teens to weird communist shut-ins to Blue Wave Democrats to the brain rot reply guys trapped in 2017. The arch New York Time-ian terms in which Very Serious People engage in interesting ideas and respectable discourse now falls somewhere between a poignant inability to read the room and a terminal condition of missing the goddamn point. How hard is it for a single pundit or politician to say, I don’t condemn violence, but people’s frustrations with our healthcare system is valid?

At the risk of belaboring things, it is obviously suboptimal for a society that the only check on people like Brian Thompson is the fraught hope that a random guy kills them in the street. In this context, it is also important to recognize the relentlessly punitive, wholly indemnified way that private health insurance companies currently prevail in America. They are built on an attritive, blunderingly vicious business model that profits off of denying people healthcare. In that context, it is also suboptimal for a society for the execs at the upper rung of these companies to feel like they can continue on in brutal and unexamined impunity. There is an acid satire in the realization that something like Medicare-for-All could’ve prevented the death of this corporate ghoul, but these are the kinds of policies that these schoolmarmy media figures unwaveringly oppose. If America were a healthy society, an ideal sense of justice would’ve arrived through regulations and a more egalitarian social contract. But the leaders of both parties only know one way to govern, and it doesn’t work, and everyone knows it doesn’t really work—but it prevails again and again because the politicians in charge mostly seem overwhelmed, out of touch, and behind the curve. So in this case, the market is self-regulating with an invisible gun.

The confluence of all these ugly truths and the rhyming, equally flagrant set of derelictions in the face of a failing healthcare system, the long-repressed shame of this undeniable abandonment, is now suddenly overwhelming—if not bleakly ironic. Some have wondered whether the killer was an ex-Marine Force Recon or former Special Forces who was screwed over. Brian Thompson was basically running a death panel for 50 million Americans and making $10 million a year doing so; there are enough of these guys in the general population that would make it statistically inevitable that one of them may have a reason to exact revenge. I will be massively disappointed if the motive turns out to be a love triangle with a personal trainer. But the camera footage shows almost a professional operator dressed like Mikey Miles wearing one of those jackets you’d get from an Instagram ad. At first, it seemed like an Agent 47 situation and not the actions of a disgruntled customer. But he wrote Deny Depose Defend on the shells, so maybe this is just the good guy with a gun we’ve heard so much about.

For a country that’s uniquely and perversely fascinated with law and order and besotted with police violence, strangely there wasn’t an officer in sight. Guess they were all playing Candy Crush. The assassin wasn’t even speedy about it, and he left on his bike. It is mind-boggling that a murder in the middle of one of the most heavily surveilled public places in America can’t be solved by a police department with a $5.6 billion annual budget. The NYPD is doing the Reddit thing where they’re claiming to be on top of the situation, but all the posters spread around the city are giving the energy of not being on top of this at all. No one knows where this guy is because most of us spend the majority of our waking hours waiting in line for things and staring at our phones. They’re also offering a $10,000 bounty for any information that leads to the arrest of the shooter, which is enough to maybe afford one month of UnitedHealthCare coverage. Sorry officers, I haven’t seen a thing—my vision insurance claim was denied.

As media outlets covered the murder, they managed to pick the smarmiest LinkedIn photo of Brian Thompson. They couldn’t find one of him with his wife and kids; it’s just him in a quarter zip—grinning with a permanent fiancé smile. The news reports have portrayed Brian Thompson as a family man who was an affable bozo around the office, and this depiction makes me hate him even more. This guy ran a company that harms independent doctor’s practices, cheats Medicaid, and leverages AI models with a 90% error rate to deny care as part of their broader strategy of systematically preventing millions of Americans from accessing healthcare.

This is a brutal and immoral way to maintain a stalemate within a janky healthcare system, and one that seemed reassuring to its administrators, right up until the moment that literal murder became the only alternative to an untenable status quo. America’s healthcare system may not be violent, but it is brutal. If you ever get seriously sick, it will bleed you dry and may even kill you, and this is by design. This isn’t a case of a system not working as intended; creating a barrier to healthcare access is baked into the business model of private insurance companies. This is an administrative brutality that happens to every American throughout their lives and it functions as a threat; it may not kill you instantly while you walk down a sidewalk, but it’s still lethal. It is in poor taste to dance on the grave of any human being, so rather I will celebrate that, for whatever reason, Brian Thompson is in hell. The eagerness of the lanyard class to view the correct ways to respond to his death as Worthy of Debate in lieu of any inquiry into why so many Americans are happy to see this man dead is recognizable to be precisely as ghoulish as tone policing always is.

It shouldn’t be surprising that a society that’s held hostage by neoliberalism and conditioned by its smash-and-grab sadism would eventually produce monstrous and violent reactions. Among the segment of the population that’s put off by things like violence inflicted on another person, this has raised some uncomfortable questions about the nature of American civic life.

Why are you more appalled by the death of a CEO who has profited off of human misery than the suffering inflicted on the victims of his company’s actions?

What kind of violence are you capable of acknowledging as sufficiently horrifying, and how do you countenance it?

Why are you unfazed by more ambient and abstracted institutional brutality?

Is your decision to shame people for mocking the murder of Brian Thompson driven by an unwillingness to confront the systemic indignities that would breed this resentment?

It’s right to wonder, but we should be past asking these questions at this point. The most significant thing to know about American politics, its outcomes or its calculations, is that it is driven by assholes; the only salient factor in any decision that these assholes make is that they absolutely do not care about the interests of anyone else who are not them or are like them.

I’ve seen a few stories about how many Fortune 500 companies are all on Zoom calls right now with their security teams. They feel scared, and that’s a rare occurrence in American life. I doubt this murder presages some kind of workers revolution, but if anything good is going to come out of this, it begins with these assholes beginning to feel afraid.

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