Once upon a time, on a long-ago Wednesday morning around 6:30, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson leaves the midtown Hilton in New York City. It’s still dark. The street is quiet; no one else on the sidewalk.
In the security cam footage, we see a young man in a hoodie enter the frame from the left. With the cold-blooded calm of a practised hitman, he takes aim with a handgun equipped with a silencer and fires several shots, hitting Thompson in the back.
It’s probably shocking to you tender youngsters, but I’m a two-hundred-year-old boomer. I’ve grown so used to televised improvisational murder, starting with JKF and continuing through Charles Manson, and onward with Vietnam and its attendant massacres, I’m well beyond the reach of shock. I even watched the director’s cut of Apocalypse Now.
I just rev up the popcorn feature on my microwave. Whoo-hoo! Televised murder! Extra butter-flavor, please!
His mission achieved, he leaves, to follow through on what we learn is a well-planned escape involving an e-bike placed strategically a couple of blocks away. He disappears into Central Park, temporarily throwing police off the scent. But only temporarily: make no mistake, Brian Thompson is important, the crime, heinous. The killer must be, will be, found.
Strangely, the history of the gunman’s travels to and sojourn in NYC is a mash-up of carefully-planned anonymity and normalcy that arouses no suspicion, and a careless trail of receipts, security footage revealing his face, and coffee cups that yield DNA samples. At the scene of the crime, bullet casings are found labelled Delay, Deny, Depose; words that echo the Insurance industry “formula” for handling, that is, denying, claims.
Brian Thompson is—sorry, was—a millionaire whose corporation prides itself on the highest denial rate in the business. He was also an “alleged” criminal, under investigation for insider trading. He was also “just following orders”, as it were, when he, for example, tacitly approved an AI algorithm used by the company that automatically denies claims.
The algorithm was known by him and by his company to have a ninety percent error rate. No action is taken on this, because statistically, only two percent of denied claimants (in this case, seniors on Medicare) will challenge the denials. It’s a just a cost of doing business.
Social media erupts, but not in grief. I won’t repeat here the gleeful gallows humor, or the finger-wagging of high-minded spokespersons who scold the mob and their deliriously, universally unsympathetic cries of “serves him right”. They pay lip service to thousands of tragic stories of misery that UnitedHealthcare, but really Brian Thompson, caused.
Yes, I repeat, that he caused, the CEO, the money-changer, the end of the road, the court of final appeal. He’s where the buck was supposed to stop. Instead, bullets.
One woman recalls that there was no ambulance covered to take her husband’s corpse to the morgue; coverage ended the very second of his final exhale. A mother is told her child, just out of major surgery, can’t be provided a bed overnight. A man remembers in sorrow how his father refused treatment in a form of long-term suicide rather than saddle his family with debt they could never repay.
The official announcement of the shooting on Facebook garners over forty thousand laughing emojis before it’s deleted.
It’s not just that sympathy is withheld. Brian Thompson’s death is cause for ghoulish celebration, much to the pearl-clutching chagrin of those who insist that the citizens of the US, no matter how horrendously they are abused, insulted, lied to or defrauded, must always maintain the moral high ground; must “go high when others go low”. Shame on them! That’s not how we do things!
Isn’t it? Not how—who does things? It’s how Brian Thompson did things; it seems very much how things are done. Where’s the shame for a capitalist business model wherein sick people are the raw materials who are then literally killed for profit?
Police offer fifty thousand dollars for clues. Obviously no expense will be spared. Brian Thompson’s life matters.
Just—not to most people.
Adding a little frisson, in the manner of the musical “Chicago” in which infamy equals sex appeal, the “alleged” killer, Luigi Mangione, is 26, Italian, an Ivy League grad, and mamma mia is he a babe. Goodness gracious, is it me or is it hot in here?
Laura Ingraham, who as far as I can tell has no biological reason for existing, says it’s “liberals” who have the poor taste to get all wet and bothered, but I would like to correct her. It’s gay men, baby, and count me in for some well-sculpted abs and an unfurling of uncut salami.
I’ve been an outlaw in my time, and, thanks to the trauma of the AIDS crisis, during which I found out just how reviled and expendable gay men were, I’ve acclimatised to the heady mix of murder and lust and social stigma and shame that’s the landscape of my six decades, you can be sure of that. I’ve been called human trash, pedophile—not true, no matter how many times you cry save the children, but who believes us?—pervert, queer, nancy boy and faggot, and your hatred became my exoskeleton, the plastic casing around my heart.
Enjoy your creation.
I have no qualms, baby, no qualms at all about a hour or twelve in the sack, all funk and sweat and disordered limbs and wet mouths on skin, with a dreamboat forty years my junior who’s got someone else’s blood on his hands. I’ll lick it off, I’ll smear it on my cheeks, Rambo-style. I’m not afraid of blood. Eat, drink and commit homicide— !
“I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.” – Clarence Darrow
Meanwhile, a year ago on an MTA subway car…
Mother of god, do we have to go through this again? Jordan Neely, an unhoused Black man, clearly in need of psychiatric care and behaving in a “threatening manner” on a subway — because of being unhoused, because he has nowhere to go, because he has no care, because there’s no hospital bed for him, no medications, no stability, nothing to eat, no income, because he had fallen through the cracks, correction, the giant chasm, in a system that barely supports whites and in no way is going to support Blacks, is put in a choke hold by Daniel Penny, a white guy. He maintains the choke hold for six minutes. Video footage shows passengers begging Penny to let Jordan go as his life slips away. Daniel is a brave vigilante!
Guess what? Now, no fair peeking! That’s right! The Black man dies. The white guy is acquitted.
White politicians celebrate Jordan Neely’s murder. There’s not even a hint of culpability, no acknowledgment that a deeply racist, deeply unjust system failed him. There’s no acknowledgment that he’s even human or deserving of any consideration, any regret.
In fact, today, this very day I’m writing, Daniel has been invited by Vice President-elect JD Vance to join Donald Trump’s suite at the Army-Navy football game.
“Daniel’s a good guy, and New York’s mob district attorney tried to ruin his life for having a backbone. I’m grateful he accepted my invitation and hope he’s able to have fun and appreciate how much his fellow citizens admire his courage.”
J D Vance, X
Yes, indeed! Have fun, Daniel! I invite you to imagine, if you dare, the verdict and the response had a Black man held a white man in a choke hold for six minutes.
Hey, don’t you dare have fun about the murder of Brian Thompson! He had a wife! And kids!
Who is Jordan Neely’s family? Why are you wasting your time asking stupid questions? He might as well be an insect, a cockroach in a corner. He might as well be invisible. He’s crack-smoking trash.
Nice healthcare, America! Slow death for you of the middle and working classes, because your HMO can extract every penny you own before they off you. But your experience will be genteel.
You’ll get a letter explaining why the insurance you paid for doesn’t count for squat. You’re too skinny, too fat. You weren’t sick in the right way or at the right time. Your ambulance that takes you to hospital after your car crash won’t be covered, because it wasn’t pre-approved. (I’m not making that up.) You didn’t read the small print and you can’t afford the deductible and anyway your loved one is dead or will be and it’s all so very much a shame.
Yours sincerely.
For the unemployed, mentally ill, unhoused, Black: they’ve no money to be extracted and can be left to the care of vigilantes, the bottom feeders and street sweepers of a broken system that no one believes in. Or they’ll dump you, still in your hospital gown, on skid row.
Poor people are de facto trash. They brought it on themselves. They didn’t pull up their bootstraps. If they had, they wouldn’t be—Black, I guess? Or poor? Does it matter which?
We could have that Marxist debate, about whether white supremacy or the structures of capitalism are the primary narrative in this society, but they so clearly intersect—POC being much more likely to fall behind in terms of income, health outcomes, opportunity, you name it—that the point is moot.
The system didn’t fail him. The system did exactly what it was designed to do.
Will the murder of Brian Thompson result in a reform of the healthcare system? Sure—Trump will cancel “Obamacare”! Some MAGA voters vowed they’ll never be on board with Obamacare, but will gladly buy in to the Affordable Care Act.
I wish I was joking.
Black Lives Matter responded to Daniel Penny’s acquittal at a press conference. An eternity of pain and bitterness and rage etched on their faces. Fulgent rage.
Oh, America. You are a powder keg. Prepare for the —apocalypse tomorrow, apocalypse yesterday, but never apocalypse today?
I’m old, but I can see the flames from here. They must be burning brighter.
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As always, you cut straight ( if you’ll forgive the use of the word), to the heart of the matter.
Really outstanding writing! Keep it up!!!
Frank
I, too, see the Flames in the distance. Beautifully written. Thank you