Above photo: Health care advocates risk arrest protesting care denials at UnitedHealthcare on July 15, 2024 in Minnetonka, Minnesota. David Berding/Getty Images for People’s Action Institute.
“In a fairer world, Brian Thompson wouldn’t have been murdered. He would already have been put behind bars,” writes foreign policy analyst Sunjeev Bery. And Bery is right. Others have made this point over the last few years, that companies like UnitedHealth are deep cesspools of irredeemable, psychopathic corruption, which in UnitedHealth’s specific case prevents doctors from relieving suffering and saving lives. The shooting of Thompson, their CEO, calls attention to many serious flaws in our society besides the corruption of the profit-obsessed health insurance industry, but let’s focus on just two.
The first flaw is the definition of murder. Whoever shot Thompson is guilty of murder by its normal definition. The bigger question is why people like Thompson, who kill tens of thousands of people every year, are not also guilty of murder. Evidently, when you’re poor, unlike Thompson, or not a corporate fat-cat, you’re held accountable for everything you do; just one small act can put you in jail for years. If you wear a suit and tie in a lucrative corporate job, you are held accountable for virtually nothing, no matter how much damage you do.
Corporations annually kill tens of thousands by various means, and it’s not called murder. Yet, one man kills one CEO and then it is called “murder.” Certainly we have a serious instance of injustice here if there is a statement by Joseph Stalin, of all people, that fits it: “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” This time, the killer of Thompson is demonized while mass murderer Thompson is not. Political scientist Anthony Grasso put it well: “We condemn one act as crime and rationalize the other as commerce.” Alex Lawson of Social Security Works said, “It is (barely) true that UnitedHealth didn’t design the U.S. system of corporate insurance, which kills tens of thousands of people a year through denial of care. But they certainly have perfected it and turned it into a medical murder apparatus at industrial scale. They not only block all attempts to change the system in the direction of public health, they bribe and bully with their billions in blood money to make it even crueler.”
The second flaw is in the media and law-enforcement reactions. In countless stories, the corporate-controlled mainstream media has been hyperventilating, calling the attack shocking. (The real shock is that this hadn’t happened before.) Yet every day in America poor people are gunned down in the same way Thompson was. Where are the media passion and attention for them? That question has gone entirely unaddressed by news establishments. Journalist Cenk Uygur put it extremely well when he wrote, “76,000 Americans die every year because of the health insurance industry. I also mourn for them. And I don’t see any press coverage or concern for their deaths.” Those 76,000 had loved ones, too. This inconsistency also is easy to see in law enforcement agency behavior. Instantly, law enforcement was fully mobilized to find the gunman, including the FBI and the NYPD. Flyers with the suspect’s photo went up everywhere asking for leads. A big reward was offered. Eighty police departments around the country offered to lend a hand in the nationwide manhunt. Does any of this ever happen when poor Americans are shot and killed in poor neighborhoods? How can anyone possibly justify this blatant double standard?
It would be difficult to argue that shooting a CEO is an acceptable solution to the massive harm that insurance companies do, but we can’t allow this shooting to pass without trying to address the huge flaws it reveals in our systems of health care, media, law enforcement, economics, and ethics. Assassination is not the solution. (It also doesn’t work.) Condemn the assassin, but then address and solve the problems that led to the assassination.
Nor does this killing meet the definition of terrorism. Any thinking person finds that charge laughably hypocritical. If the definition of terrorism includes the words “a method of coercion that uses fear to influence governments or populations,” it’s obvious that this shooting is not terrorism because the only population frightened is CEOs. Suddenly now single shootings are terrorism? When did shootings that terrify entire poor communities ever receive the official label of “terrorism”?
The frightened oligarchs who should be in jail are counting on us to forget about this as the media they control distracts us while we again become consumed by our oppressive, meaningless, underpaying jobs. This has usually been the case when the spotlight falls upon the malicious deeds of these plutocrats. Instead of letting them off the hook, we must pressure politicians, march in the streets, and meet to brainstorm ways to take life back from these villains, pushing for justice and sanity. Pushing for our salvation.
Peter Greenhill is a philosopher and social justice/human rights activist as well as the retired longtime director of the Iolani Peace Institute at Iolani School, Honolulu, Hawai’i.