The People Cheering the UnitedHealthcare CEO Shooting
After her mother was diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer, Anna watched for years as she fought both the illness and the health-care system until her death in 2020. “The fight with the insurance companies was, in many ways, worse than cancer,” Anna says. “It took over my entire family’s life.”
She recalls her mother’s time-consuming struggles to get new treatments approved. “It was just so maddening to know they were shaving years off my mom’s life because of the paperwork,” Anna recalls.
So on Wednesday morning when she heard the news that UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead in Manhattan, she had a perverse reaction.
“I am ashamed to admit it, but there was a little surge of Schadenfreude,” says Anna, who, like several others in this story, asked to use a pseudonym to protect her privacy.
She was far from alone. Across the internet and on social media, countless people expressed grim satisfaction or even glee at the murder of 50-year-old Thompson, who is survived by a wife and two sons. Authorities say he was killed in a targeted attack. Bullet casings recovered by police were inscribed with the words deny, defend, and depose, apparent references to how insurance companies deal with patient claims.
“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,” one popular post on X read.
Another on Reddit said, “I hope he still gets an ambulance bill that UHC refuses to pay.”
UnitedHealth Group’s Facebook post sharing its statement on Thompson’s death received more than 46,000 reactions, with about 41,000 of respondents clicking the platform’s “haha” option displaying a laughing emoji.
For many, Thompson’s death has been a means to vent and commiserate over the state of American health care and the insurance industry specifically, pitting multibillion-dollar corporations against patients who often have to fight to get even routine procedures covered — if they aren’t denied outright.
Along with patients, health-care providers tangle daily with insurance companies, and they were not immune from the same feelings. A post discussing the shooting on a nursing-community sub-Reddit prompted a deluge of dark jokes. “I would offer thoughts and prayers but I’m gonna need a prior authorization first,” one user wrote.
Claire, a psychologist, says she and many in her field were recently informed of UnitedHealthcare’s plans to cut rates for therapists who use the digital mental-health-care platforms Alma and Headway, causing several of her colleagues to drop their United-insured clients owing to the expense.
“People have been feeling like executives or whoever oversees UnitedHealthcare in particular is directly harming if not contributing to the deaths of people, so I think that level of despair and helplessness perpetuates,” Claire says. “I never thought I’d be someone that would cheer vigilante justice, but it was pretty universal, at least in my community.”
Diane, an oncology doctor, says her field has also suffered.
“UnitedHealth Group in particular and Optum, which is their pharmacy benefit manager, make their money by profiteering off sick people, and we have a health-care system that is perfectly constructed to create great wealth and power in large corporations and is increasingly badly constructed to actually provide health care to patients,” she says. “The frustration from patients, from their caregivers, from the people who love them, from doctors, nurses, everybody in the health-care fields is just so huge right now. I’m saddened but not surprised at this event.”
Though Diane is critical of the industry, she’s anxious about health-care-related violence: Over the past year, she has taken increased precautions at her own workplace to guard against the possibility of an active shooter.
“I’m worried about the fact that violence in the country is just escalating so much,” she says. “That this is a symptom of everyone thinking violence will solve their problems, and that I find tremendously frightening.”
Anna too is wary of glorifying violence.
“I don’t believe there’s any justification for murder,” she says. “I think it sets a terrible precedent, and logically I know that a society that functions this way is doomed to collapse. Yet I still couldn’t temper my emotional reaction. I did feel a little bit of satisfaction.”
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