On December 4th, 2024 somebody brazenly murdered the CEO of United Healthcare, Brain Thompson, in broad daylight. Health Insurance company executives around the country are wiping their websites of their identifying information in fear that any one of them might be next. Nationwide law enforcement is hunting for the shooter, but thus far he appears to have slipped through their fingers. What do I think? Well I hope he escapes because I love the smell of justice in the morning.
Health Insurance companies are a plague on modern society. They are the ultimate form of capitalistic parasite that has managed to wedge itself somewhere between our collective needs and our collective lack of resources. They then exacerbated the situation so they could make billions of dollars a year of profit in the process. Make no mistake, they are in the business of killing their customers for profit.
Don’t believe me? Check out the Denial Rates by Insurer. United Healthcare has the highest rate as they deny 32% of claims that their paying customers make each year. According to this document on their own website they have 51 million members worldwide. Now let’s say that each one of those members made a claim in 2022 (the year the PDF claims those stats are for). Let’s say that 1% of those claims were for lifesaving care giving us 510,000 of them. Let’s say UHC denied 32% of them. That’s 163,200 lifesaving claims they denied in 2022. How many of those translated into deaths? Probably quite a few. Let’s be “kind” and round it down to a straight 100,000 deaths a year.
According to his LinkedIn page Thompson was named UHC CEO in April of 2021. Given my cocktail napkin rate of 100,000 deaths per year, that means that under his tenure as CEO Thompson and UHC murdered 350,000 of their own members to make record profits, give or take.
Brian Thompson and his ilk are mass fucking murderers. The shooter, whomever he may be, is a fucking American hero and should be celebrated as such. This American Carnage in which the rich and the powerful siphon everything away from the rest of us has got to come to an end. Eventually society is going to have to come to the realization that just because its profitable, it doesn’t make it moral. Killing people to line your own pockets and the pockets of your deranged and sociopathic investors is not acceptable.
Here is a relevant quote:
“The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.”
- Karl Marx
Relax, I’m not about to extol the virtues of communism. Frankly it’s a trite ideology that ignores the base components of human nature, which capitalism happens to not only embrace but encourage. They are effectively polar opposites and in their purest forms, both amount to nothing short of tomfoolery. But while Marx may have been wrong about Communism being the solution, he wasn’t wrong about Capitalism not being the solution. Because it isn’t.
Capitalism is inherently immoral. It pits us against each other. It posits that the accumulation of money and resources should be our ultimate end-goal. So it’s no wonder that over the hundreds of years we’ve had to figure out how to exist within its confines, some of us have become exceedingly good at it. So good in fact, that others are forced to do without basic necessities and aren’t even afforded to the dignity to die comfortably.
The real irony of this is that while America largely seems to be rooting for the shooter, we are clearly still missing the point. After all just over a month ago we re-elected another sociopathic billionaire piece of shit, Donald J. Trump, as president. This time he’s bringing his entire billionaires club along for the ride to cosplay as technocrats with an actual clue instead of as the entitled brats born with a silver spoon shoved up their asses that they actually are.
They will of course fail and in the process of failing they will make things worse for millions of people and this will likely result in the deaths of a sizeable percentage of those people. Trump’s goose-stepping around COVID arguably resulted in many more Americans dying than were necessary. That’s because the only thing he and his brethren actually know how to do is to exploit a system that allows them to act impudently as robber barons who steal from the poor and give unto themselves.
When is enough, enough? I mean that both in terms of how rich can these pieces of shit get and how much of this we are willing to tolerate.
I guess we’ll find out together.
As for Brian Thompson, Jack Nicholson as the Joker in 1989’s Batman said it best:
