… what it is ain’t exactly clear.

The opening lines from the classic Vietnam war era protest song For What It’s Worth by the group Buffalo Springfield came to my mind following the killing on broad daylight in a city street in Manhattan, New York of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, America’s largest medical insurance company. What was not strange was that the killing triggered a massive manhunt and a blitz of media publicity. In the US brazen killings with guns happen many times daily and all over the country but it takes the killing of a rich person to trigger that kind of massive search for the shooter.

While that police and media response was not surprising, what was unusual was the seeming indifference, and even in some circles glee, of the public’s reaction to the killing. Thompson personally was an unknown figure, a standard corporate type, but he was clearly seen as emblematic of the evils of the private profit-seeking health insurance industry that are well-known and hardly need to be detailed. The chief one is that they try to make more money by finding every possible means to deny coverage for patient care. UnitedHealthcare was by some measures the worst offender. The resulting huge profits are transformed into huge salaries and bonuses for top executives and shareholder rewards.

As a result, some viewed the shooter as some kind of vigilante, striking a blow for ordinary people against the health insurance industry.

Despite the fact the killer’s motive remains completely unknown, the death of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO unleashed an eruption of anger from people mistreated, or untreated, by the US’s rapacious medical industry and even a grim schadenfreude from some at Thompson’s death.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are driven into bankruptcy every year by medical debts, with many of them losing their homes. Thousands die because insurance companies find reasons not to pay for treatment, including UnitedHealthcare, which denies about one-third of claims.

Anthony Zenkus, a lecturer at the Columbia School of Social Work, spoke for many in a post 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,” he wrote.

The revelation that shell casings at the scene were marked with the words “deny” and “defend” and “depose” added weight to speculation that the killer had had a vendetta against UnitedHealthcare, which earned $280bn in revenue last year insuring about 50 million people in the US. Two of the words are used by the industry in policy documents and were included in the title of a 2010 book Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.
…

Regulators and politicians have accused the company of boosting profits by systematically rejecting care to which people are entitled under their policies or of refusing to meet the full cost and leaving patients in debt.

In October, a US Senate committee released a report cataloging how UnitedHealthcare and other companies deny patients care after they have been discharged from hospital following acute operations, even when doctors say they are necessary for a full recovery. The report said that the denials were principally made to drive up profits.

The day before Thompson was killed, the American Society of Anesthesiologists issued a statement condemning another health insurance company, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, for imposing a limit on the amount of time for which it was prepared to pay for patients having surgery to receive anaesthesia. The company reversed its position after the shooting.
…

Others quoted Woody Guthrie: “Some rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.”

The backlash came not only from patients but doctors who recounted UnitedHealthcare refusing to pay for a child with cancer to receive medicines for the side effects of chemotherapy and questioning the necessity of lifesaving care. The outpouring of anger from within the medical profession at Thompson as representative of the greed of the insurance industry at the cost of lives caused Reddit moderators to delete a thread for the medical community, according to the Daily Beast.

The health insurance industry is only one part of a medical system that the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who won the 2015 Nobel prize for economics, have described as a “Sheriff of Nottingham redistribution” in the fleecing of ordinary Americans to give to rich corporations.

The level of celebration was such that the governor of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro pleaded for people to not view the shooter as a hero.

The suspected shooter Luigi Mangione has since been arrested and comes from a pretty privileged background

A grandson of a wealthy, self-made real estate developer and philanthropist, Mangione is a cousin of a current Maryland state legislator.

Valedictorian at his elite Baltimore prep school, he went on to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science in 2020 from the University of Pennsylvania, a spokesperson said.

Some reports support the idea that he was acting out of some sense of the need to punish the health care industry for its practices.

A law enforcement bulletin obtained by The Associated Press said that at the time of his arrest, Mangione was carrying a handwritten document expressing anger with what he called “parasitic” health insurance companies and a disdain for corporate greed and power.

He wrote that the U.S. has the most expensive health care system in the world and that profits of major corporations continue to rise while “our life expectancy” does not, according to the bulletin.

But other reports paint a more murky picture of someone whose thinking was somewhat confused.

While some have portrayed Mangione as “anti-capitalist,” his social media profiles show him retweeting talks by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, praising Elon Musk, and liking critiques of conservatives for their failure to understand the Unabomber’s comments on “the decay of traditional values.”

Police also say that Mangione was arrested with writings that suggest he harbored “ill will toward corporate America.” The New York Post has separately characterized Mangione as an “anti-capitalist,” citing “law enforcement sources” and other sources portraying the suspect as someone who hated the medical community due to past treatment of his relatives. 

While police have not made whatever writings were found on Mangione public, his own post-history suggests that he’s not so clear cut of an “anti-capitalist.”

One of Mangione’s final posts was a retweet of a video of Thiel discussing how many of the “great startups seem to be run by people who seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger’s.” In another retweet, Mangione reposted a statement praising Musk for his “commitment to long-term civilizational success.” The post was in reference to a post by Musk, claiming that he was in “a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke mind virus.”

One incident does not a zeitgeist make. And yet, my sense is that this wide outpouring of sympathy for a killing because the victim was seen as representing an exploitative industry suggests that the country is in an angry mood.

For those not familiar with the song that I alluded to at the beginning of this post, here it is.