Why Some People Welcomed the UnitedHealthcare Taking pictures
Picture: Mike Segar/Reuters
By now, the main points are acquainted: Minutes earlier than dawn on December 4, a person carrying a hooded jacket, a grey backpack, and a masks over the underside half of his face fired three photographs from a silenced pistol in the back of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, exterior the Hilton Lodge on West 54th Avenue. Thompson stumbled ahead, turned to face the gunman, and collapsed. The shooter appeared to level the gun at Thompson a ultimate time earlier than strolling away. The gunman escaped by means of Central Park, presumably by bike; Thompson was pronounced useless at 7:12 a.m. The NYPD recovered shell casings on the scene imprinted with the phrases “DENY,” “DELAY,” and “DEPOSE” — references, it appeared, to the techniques insurers use to keep away from paying medical claims.
Homicides in America are sometimes described as “mindless.” As in, a mindless killing; a mindless act of violence. Normally, we choose it that method. After a mass taking pictures, we quietly hope to search out out the killer was mentally unwell, disadvantaged of his senses. (The opposite type of mindless we are able to tolerate is evil, however that’s tougher to return by.) Within the days since Brian Thompson’s homicide, now we have seen, against this, a surfeit of sense-making from throughout the political spectrum. Nearly instantly, the “brazen, focused assault,” because the NYPD termed it, was interpreted as an act of retribution in opposition to the for-profit health-care business, of which Thompson — who had raised UHC’s income from $12 billion to $16 billion since 2021, incomes $10 million in 2023 for his hassle — was a distinguished beneficiary and potent image. Vitriol in opposition to the insurance coverage business, and UnitedHealthcare particularly, flooded social media. The shooter was celebrated as a people hero. Macabre jokes multiplied. “Sadly, ideas and prayers are out-of-network,” somebody quipped. “Pre-authorization for our condolences required.” In response to at least one New York Occasions story headlined, “A Torrent of Hate for Well being Insurance coverage Trade Follows CEO’s Killing,” reader feedback teemed with health-insurance horror tales: denied claims, byzantine appeals processes, chapter, distress, demise. As one Occasions reader put it, “You get what you pay for … or on this case, what you don’t.”
On Monday morning, legislation enforcement detained a person matching the shooter’s description at a McDonalds in Altoona, Pennsylvania. The suspect, police say, had a gun, a silencer, and faux identification in his possession. Additionally: a handwritten manifesto criticizing the health-care business. (“These parasites had it coming …” it supposedly reads.) For so long as he evaded seize, the shooter had remained the nameless creator of a really brief story, one whose parsimonious symbolic logic was unattainable to disregard. Now, assuming the police have their man, bits of biography, political sympathies, medical information, and different particulars will complicate the plot, including friction to its brutally elegant conceit. A lot of the media appears happy, as of Wednesday morning, to notice the suspect’s privileged background; his Ivy League diploma, it’s presumed, will diffuse any remaining sympathies. People might love an underdog, however they all the time hate an ingrate.
Within the meantime, the query stays: what to make of the general public’s preliminary response. Anger, Schadenfreude, cynicism, glibness, bloodlust — what does it say about our nation {that a} murderous spectacle was greeted this manner? Had a latent urge for food for vengeance, for coercive violence, for revolution even, been revealed? Consultants questioned. “It’s being framed as some opening blow in a broader class warfare,” Alex Goldenberg, an intelligence analyst, informed the Occasions. “Which could be very regarding because it heightens the menace setting for comparable actors to interact in comparable acts of violence.” And what about plain hard-heartedness? Thompson was a human being, with a spouse and two kids. Did we not endanger our souls, if not our social order, by justifying their struggling?
It’s a uncommon factor for an American CEO or different public determine to be focused on this method. However the construction of feeling it unleashed didn’t appear novel to me. People have an excessive amount of latest expertise assessing the worthiness of strangers for execution. It’s one of many issues we do collectively on-line: when somebody is killed by a cop or vigilante; when a protester is mowed down by a automotive; when a Palestinian baby is killed by an Israeli sniper or an Israeli civilian by Hamas. Arguing about whose lives are expendable is certainly one of America’s favourite pastimes.
What about our bloodlust? Ought to we be involved that People have betrayed an urge for food for political violence? Maybe. However the flip aspect of urge for food is metabolism: not what we would like, however how we bear what we’re given. People, we would say, have a prodigious capability for metabolizing brutality and demise — now we have been conditioned for it. As the author and gun-violence professional Patrick Blanchfield put it to me, “This occasion offers us one thing pretty uncommon: a state of affairs the place an individual victimized by a distinctively American system of normalized human liquidation — i.e., gun murder — can be consultant of that different distinctively American establishment for disposing of human life, our for-profit health-care system, a key perform of which is figuring out how a lot particular person human lives are value, and imposing these assessments with ruthlessly incentivized effectivity.” For Blanchfield, Thompson’s homicide, and the system of mechanized cruelty from which he profited, are a part of the identical regime of “human disposability” — a system through which human life, as a substitute of being treasured and priceless, is “a fungible commodity like anything.”
I sense the reader’s trepidation: Does acknowledging this hyperlink implicitly ratify the killer’s logic? Violence, we intuit, will not be one thing that must be reasoned about. To tolerate — not to mention rejoice — the elimination of 1 life for the sake of a political message looks like a deadly give up, a step on a path towards routinized horror. People are too fragile and varied to be diminished to such ruthless arithmetic.
However why ought to our ethical intuitions cease there? Ruthless arithmetic already governs our world. We’re all the time topic to a regime that reduces folks to numbers, and disposes of them as means to ends. Within the bigger social order, demise and motive are wed. Our army bureaucracies, arms industries, police departments, hospital programs, and, sure, non-public insurers, agree: The expendability of human lives can and should be rationally determined. On daily basis, highly effective people make calculations about who ought to reside and who ought to die, guided by assessments of relative worth — generally by concepts of security and who deserves it; usually by the purpose of retaining shareholders pleased.
The shooter claimed this prerogative for himself with no company forms, an algorithm, or a system of legal guidelines to authorize the privilege. It’s a horrible factor to destroy a human life for the sake of propaganda, and a horrible factor to take action for the sake of revenue. (There’s hubris in each.) We will be unable to disrupt our metabolism for social struggling by indulging our urge for food for political violence; we are able to’t kill our method out of a society premised on human disposability. Nevertheless it have to be mentioned that violence finds extra buy, seduces extra persuasively, within the absence of different apparent and significant pathways for registering discontent. People are dying, going bankrupt, and wallowing in despair below a health-care system that prioritizes the income of some over the essential wants of others: The place ought to they flip? Who’s listening?
In Stephen Sondheim’s bleak musical satire Assassins, the ensemble solid consists of presidential killers and aspirants (e.g., John Wilkes Sales space, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr., and so on.). Every is depicted as some number of loser or freak; their motives, if political, are additionally conflated with a generalized sense of dissatisfaction, the sensation that the American “proper to be pleased” has confirmed as hole because it was tantalizing. (“Hey, child, failed your check? Dream lady unimpressed? Present her you’re the very best / When you can shoot a president …”) For Sondheim, violence is sensible — a really American type of sense — on this method. If America is a land of alternative, it stays so solely as a result of, within the final occasion, when your life has didn’t end up, and your portion of happiness has been distributed to someone else, you may all the time declare your comfort prize — spectacle, movie star, fame — and shoot the president.
Like America, Sondheim’s play wears its cynicism on its sleeve, however solely to protect in opposition to a unadorned sincerity beneath. We’re sardonic about America’s guarantees as a result of it’s too painful to face our feeble religion that they’re actual. (Solely a real believer is able to blasphemy.) What the play suggests, a minimum of to me, is that political violence isn’t incompatible with democracy; it feeds on the despair that democracy, in its crippled type, produces. Democracy cultivates in us ethical impulses, creativeness, and needs that demand satisfaction. Violence is alluring once they can discover no believable outlet, when the programs that govern our lives are overzealous in containing our fugitive hopes. As a pair of Sondheim’s assassins sing:
And all you need to do
Is squeeze your little finger
Ease your little finger again —
You’ll be able to change the world
No matter else is true
You belief your little finger
Only a single little finger
Can —
Change the world
