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Brian Thompson (NBC News)

Just days after the one year anniversary of Henry Kissinger’s death, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was fatally shot outside of a Manhattan hotel. The only thing these two events have in common is that both men died, but the response to the latter has been reminiscent of the former. It got me thinking, as I have numerous times since the almost universal celebration of the late war criminal’s demise, about the perceived norms for how to react when learning an explicitly or implicitly bad person has died? Or has, in this most recent case, been killed?

I noticed Wednesday the online discourse devolved into fights about whether or not it’s okay to celebrate the deliberate killing of a person, even if they inflicted pain on others as a byproduct of their work—in Brian Thompson’s case, as the head of a multi-billion dollar company that profits off of prolonging illness and suffering. While it’s an important philosophical quandary, I was more interested in others: Why were people glad about this act of violence? What societal factors had set the stage for unapologetic glee in the face of another’s demise? And why were we fighting with one another, instead of fighting the broken system that presented this norm to be broken down in the first place? 

Thompson, 50, was walking into the Hilton on 6th avenue around 6:40am Wednesday morning when a gunman approached him from behind, shot him multiple times, and fled. The suspect remains at large, with not one of the NYPD’s 36,000 officers or one of the thousands of street cameras able to catch him. We don’t know his name, or even what his face looks like, as it was mostly concealed in security footage; the closest thing we have to a motive is reporting from ABC News that the “words ‘deny,’ ‘defend’ and ‘depose’ were discovered by detectives on the shell casings found at the scene.” This could be a riff on the Three D’s of how health insurers rake in profits: Delay, Deny, Defend. 

We know the gunman stopped at a nearby Starbucks before the shooting and that he left the crime scene on a bike. Other than that, we know almost nothing. Yet many people already know that, for them personally, this man performed a public service that may elevate him to folk hero status. 

Kissinger, on the other hand, was a known quantity. In the wake of his death at 100 years old last fall, I had the chance to speak with journalist Spencer Ackerman about the obituary he wrote for Rolling Stone. “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies,” the viral headline read, succinctly capturing the national mood. In our conversation, Ackerman talked about the struggle to explain to his daughter the gleeful response to the death of Kissinger, Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State who was responsible for between three and four million deaths in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and Bangladesh. The following has continued to stick with me:

I had a conversation with my daughter who was like, “Why are people excited? So are you happy that this guy died?” And I was trying to talk about it in terms that I wanted her to take away from this. That it is a bad habit of the soul to celebrate anyone’s death. But that emerges from our understanding of our humanity, what we owe to one another, the basic respect and dignity in viewing human lives as precious and in viewing them as valuable. And that’s a contract. And there are gonna be some people, like Henry Kissinger, who break that contract at grand scale, and you don’t have to be sad when someone like that dies. You can feel relieved. You don’t want, in general, to be happy when people die. That is not a good way of being that will ultimately hurt you more than it will hurt them. But there are some people whose deaths come as a relief, and sometimes they come as a relief because justice was never served for the acts of such a person. And relief is the closest thing to justice that people will experience. 

When I saw the responses to Thompson’s killing start to roll in, it quickly became clear he was someone who many Americans considered to have violated the human contract.

“He wasn’t ‘fatally shot by a faceless assailant’, he was ‘sent to an out-of-network provider’ one Bluesky user joked. “Are we sure the bullet wound wasn’t a pre-existing condition?” another quipped in reference to the frequent practice of insurance companies denying claims based on so-called pre-existing medical conditions. The UnitedHealth Facebook post mourning Thompson’s death has more than 22,000 emoji reactions, 18,000 of which are the laughing face.

And as it turns out, United has one of the highest rates of denial; according to one statistic, the company denies 32% of claims. A lawsuit last year alleged the company used artificial intelligence with a 90% error rate to strike down pleas from the people whose lives were literally in their hands. ProPublica published a damning investigation into United’s denial of coverage to a chronically ill college student who filed a lawsuit against them. His story is just one of thousands told and untold. 

While the comparison between Thompson and Kissinger may have seemed extreme at first, in this context the space between them grows smaller, and the cultural resonance louder. I admit I initially had some pause when I saw my feed full of people who took no issue with the targeted killing of another human being, even if he received a reported $10.2 million annual compensation package furnished by obscene premiums paid by hardworking people. So instead of jumping into the fray as I usually do, I sat with the feelings and contemplated them instead.

In his 2020 book “I You We Them”, British author Dan Getton writes of the “desk killer”: a person who doesn’t carry out direct violence against people, but orchestrates and sanctions it from the comfort of a temperature-controlled office.

“You can find people killing from their desks and their computers in the military, but also in the civil service,” Gretton writes. “They might be in the oil industry, armaments, pharmaceuticals, but you can also find them in finance, insurance, politics or law. They rarely intend to kill, or injure, but their actions, combined with the vast and diffuse reach of government and contemporary corporate power, result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and devastated lives.”

Brian Thompson, with the healthcare of 49 million Americans under his purview, could have been considered a “desk killer.” But does the implicit harm he inflicted by helming a company that routinely denies people access to life-changing medication and procedures (and consequently punishes people for being too poor to pay) excuse his killing? Right away people seemed to be ascribing their own feelings about the healthcare system onto this stranger in the absence of any concrete information about what had actually motivated him to kill. Revenge fantasies danced in their heads before we even knew whether or not revenge was a factor.

Fellow health insurance giant Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield was coincidentally in the news Wednesday, though for a very different reason: A new policy in three states, “will arbitrarily pre-determine the time allowed for anesthesia care during a surgery or procedure. If an anesthesiologist submits a bill where the actual time of care is longer than Anthem’s limit, Anthem will deny payment for the anesthesiologist’s care.”

As a person who has undergone four major surgeries under anesthesia—including a neurosurgery lasting nine hours—it’s sickening to think that medically-necessary treatment will be rationed to enrich already wealthy corporate executives. But it’s certainly not unfathomable. 

“This is just the latest in a long line of appalling behavior by commercial health insurers looking to drive their profits up at the expense of patients and physicians providing essential care,” one doctor said in a news release from the American Society of Anesthesiologists. 

Kim Keck, President and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, took to LinkedIn on Wednesday to mourn Thompson’s killing.

But even on LinkedIn, known as the preferred social network for aspiring thought leaders and vapid tech bros, the norms simply refused to hold. 

“While I do not condone violence, I would be dead or bankrupt right now if BMS [Bristol Myers Squibb] did not have a grant program for their cancer drugs,” one commenter replied. “I was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer and UHC denied every claim. While today’s event is tragic, it does not come as a surprise to the millions of people – like myself – who pay their OOP [out of pocket] costs and premiums only to be turned away at their greatest time of need.”

“United HealthCare must be held accountable for what has been done to people’s lives while they become millionaires,” another commenter wrote.

While the gunman remains at large, so do our feelings about the crime he committed. Whether this sets a precedent for future violence or similar reactions remains to be seen. As the specter of a federal government hellbent on repealing the Affordable Care Act looms, private health insurers are likely to be the subject of increased existential rage. At the very least, the public reaction to the coldblooded killing of a CEO should serve as a wakeup call to other practitioners of corporate greed: While your wealth and status may garner respect in life, the same guarantee cannot be made in death.