Perspective: UnitedHealthcare Shooting

If you’ve seen Pixar’s The Incredibles, you know that when Mr. Incredible went into hiding he didn’t actually stop being a hero. In his cover profession he worked for a health insurance company, tasked with denying as many claims as possible, but that’s not what he actually did. As an insider, he knew all of the loopholes and he used that knowledge to help the sick and elderly get the coverage they were actually owed anyway.

There’s a real hero for you!

Fast forward 20 years and America’s healthcare epidemic has gotten even worse, with health insurance and pharmaceutical companies and their CEO’s making huge profits at the expense of those most vulnerable among us. Healthcare, which is a basic human right in every other industrialized nation, is one of the biggest challenges facing average Americans today. You have to sift through hundreds of pages of coverage options, much of it intentionally written in obtuse language, and even after you choose a plan you’re far from out of the woods. HMO? PPO? In network? Out of network? Which co-pay for which doctors?

Most of us just opt not to go the doctor unless it’s an absolute emergency, which is, after all, the point of the exercise. The insurance companies want people to pay them lots of money and then not go to the doctor.

One of the worst offenders among the health insurance scammers is UnitedHealthcare, which leads the industry with a 32% decline rate and reported $16 billion in profits in 2023. Their CEO, the late Brian Thompson, made $10.2 million in 2023 and is credited with implementing measures that increased the company’s profit margin by $4 billion over two years. One of the ways he did that was by introducing AI to streamline the denial process…and the AI is very good at that. They are now being sued for that very practice, as CBS News reported at the time:

The lawsuit, filed in mid-November in federal court in Minnesota, claims UnitedHealth illegally denied “elderly patients care owed to them under Medicare Advantage Plans” by deploying an AI model known by the company to have a 90% error rate, overriding determinations made by the patients’ physicians that the expenses were medically necessary.

“The elderly are prematurely kicked out of care facilities nationwide or forced to deplete family savings to continue receiving necessary medical care, all because [UnitedHealth’s] AI model ‘disagrees’ with their real live doctors’ determinations,” according to the complaint. 

Enter Luigi Mangione, the man standing accused of gunning down Thompson in NYC last month. I’m not saying Mangione is a hero, but there are plenty of people who weren’t upset about the death of one of America’s true vigilante villains. To date, sympathizers have donated more than $140,000 to aid in his defense, and one can’t help but wonder if more wealthy insurance CEOs should be worried.

More than the event itself, I’m interested in the reactions. The media, all owned by huge corporations with wealthy CEOs who put profits over people, started falling all over themselves to condemn the shooter. It wasn’t just the callous and cynical “thoughts and prayers” we get for the thousands of children gunned down in America’s schools (see: Madison, Wisconsin), there was a full-on unified effort to make Thomson into some innocent victim and now to paint Mangione as public enemy #1.

Neither is accurate.

Voters and activists have been speaking out and taking action to try and salvage America’s heath care system ever since it became a for-profit industry over a period of time from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. Hillary Clinton, when she was First Lady, pushed healthcare as a right in the 1990s, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore put a huge spotlight on the issue with his film “Sicko” in 2007, Barrack Obama made it a foundation of his first presidential campaign and then his first term in office and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is continuing his call for Medicare For All and healthcare as a human right to this very day. Himself a powerful force in Presidential politics, Sanders wrote extensively of this issue and his plan to fix it in his recent book, It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism. Single-payer healthcare, which cuts out the predatory insurance companies, polls higher than any other issue in the country year after year, so why don’t we have it? Isn’t this a Democracy?

Well, not so much.

What America has become is, at best, a corporatocracy, and at worst a fascist state. A handful of billionaires are the true architects of America in an age where running for national office is insanely expensive. The vast majority of candidates on both sides of the political divide have to mortgage their souls and the well being of their constituents to afford to be in the game. There is another cost, though, one that outweighs financial considerations. Desperate for someone to actually do their jobs, the small percentage of Americans who still believe voting will bring a solution switch parties every four or eight years in search of someone brave enough to actually solve the big problems.

I wrote about this recently in this space, and while the Republican Party has gone completely mad, there may still be hope that Democrats will figure this out when they finish licking their wounds over the pasting they took in the November election.

If the politicians don’t do their jobs and actually carry out the will of the people they claim to represent, Brian Thompson may just be the tipping point in the issue. Desperate people often resort to desperate measures, and Mangione or whoever actually did kill him may have shown desperate Americans, many of whom have more guns than sense, a path forward. It’s a dark path, to be sure, but when all other options have been exhausted, some feel the only thing left to do is lash out with lethal force.

-B