Brian Thompson, the 50-year-old CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down Wednesday morning in what police have described as a “premeditated, preplanned, targeted attack.” The crime has evoked widespread shock and condemnation. But it has also exposed—in an occasionally sadistic fashion—the profound depths of Americans’ rage toward their broken health care system. “The jokes about the United CEO aren’t really about him,” journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote on his Substack. “They’re about the rapacious health care system he personified and which Americans feel deep pain and humiliation about.”
Prior to his killing, Thompson, who was reportedly under investigation by the Justice Department for possible insider trading, had apparently been receiving threats. “I just know that he said there were some people that had been threatening him,” his wife told NBC News. “Basically, I don’t know, a lack of coverage? I don’t know details.” The act has been widely condemned by public officials, from Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar to Republican senator Rick Scott. But in the 48 hours since Thompson’s killing, social media has lit up with mockery and disdain for both Thompson and the wider industry he represented. When UnitedHealth Group posted the news of Thompson’s death to Facebook on Wednesday, the vast majority of reactions, more than 76,000 and counting, were the laugh-crying emoji.
“Saw mainstream news coverage about the killing of the CEO of United Healthcare on TikTok and I think political and industry leaders might want to read the comments and think hard about them,” the political strategist Tobita Chow wrote on X, sharing several screenshots of the reactions on TikTok. They included a slew of jokes about health-insurance jargon like “prior authorization,” complaints about substandard coverage, and the observation that many thousands of people had reacted with similar schadenfreude.
However insensitive, these reactions cut to an anger, shared by many Americans, at the state of the health-insurance industry. UnitedHealthcare—the single-largest health insurer by market share—has been embroiled in a series of high-profile nonpayment and coverage-denial scandals. No one knows precisely how often private insurers deny claims, but a September 2023 survey by the health-policy group KFF found that nearly one in five insured adults had a claim turned down by insurers in the US over the 12 months prior.
UnitedHealthcare, in particular, has reportedly used computer algorithms to automatically deny rehab care to vulnerable seniors in Medicare Advantage plans, a practice the company is being sued over in a class-action complaint. Earlier this year, a Senate committee also found that UnitedHealthcare (as well as Humana and CVS, the owner of Aetna) limited access to post-acute care for Medicare Advantage patients at far higher rates than they did for other types of care. (A spokesperson for UnitedHealth Group has said the class-action suit had “no merit” and claimed that the denials were simply based on coverage criteria and the terms of the insurance plans. As for the Senate report, a company spokesperson likewise claimed that it “mischaracterizes the Medicare Advantage program and our clinical practices” while ignoring “criteria demanding greater scrutiny around post-acute care.”)
Meanwhile, the company’s revenue ballooned to the tune of $372 billion last year. Thompson himself took home $10.2 million in compensation last year, an eye-popping figure that has predictably made the rounds on social media. Perhaps unsurprisingly, public polling shows that Americans dislike the insurance industry overall: In a 2023 Gallup poll, a mere 5% of respondents described insurers’ services as “excellent,” and 20% said that cost caused them to put off treatment of a serious medical condition.
Which may explain why some Americans are quite literally celebrating murder. On Wikipedia, editors locked down pages about Thompson and his death after users altered them to describe the executive as a “parasite” and a “conman” who is “currently burning in hell.” “It’s actually kind of touching that the one thing that can bring together our fractious and disunited country is celebrating the assassination of a health insurance CEO,” posted David Austin Walsh, a University of Virginia historian. “Anyway try to live your life in such a way that if you’re murdered the entire Internet doesn’t think that you had it coming.”