What is Your Life Worth?

If 38-million people are glad you're dead, you're doing something wrong.

So, the CEO of UnitedHealth, Brian Thompson has been assassinated. In response, the public pages of CEOs for healthcare insurance companies around the world have vanished. Executives are clamoring to hire private security firms. The aura of fear is palpable.

The victims of men like Brian Thompson live with fear every day. The only difference is: our society collectively gives exactly zero fucks about the ordinary person struggling to pay their medical bills. The mass media, our politicians, our law-enforcement... they step into high gear when a man worth millions is murdered, but can't be found when the actions of men like Brian create untold suffering for millions of American citizens every year. It looks to me like our society only cares about one type of "million": the greenback.

What is your life worth compared to Brian Thompson? If someone stalked you, or me, and murdered us, would there be public outcry? Would a massive manhunt be under way?

Why is your life worth less than Brian's?

Because I don't think your life's value should be based on your net worth. I don't think that you should have to watch your loved ones suffer through grotesque illnesses just so men like Brian Thompson can prosper.

It doesn't matter if you're Left, Right, or Center – UnitedHealth doesn't care!

UnitedHealth made a profit of $22 billion in 2023, and, "When it comes to denying claims, multiple reports suggest that UHC, which is the country’s largest health insurer and serves some 50 million people, is an industry leader" (Forbes).

Translation: UnitedHealth profits off the suffering, misery, and death of ordinary Americans.

It doesn't matter if you're Left, Right, or Center – UnitedHealth doesn't care! Your political affiliations don't matter to these people because you don't matter to them, beyond your ability to act as an expendable battery in the vast generator of their profit margins.

The situation with healthcare insurers in the United States has reached an all-time low, and even our lackadaisical political process has taken some interest. A 2024 report from the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations notes that "insurers are intentionally using prior authorization to boost profits by targeting costly yet critical stays in post-acute care facilities" (among a laundry list of other sins).

In the world of corporate leadership, there's a pervasive and insidious idea that the sole responsibility of executives is to maximize a return on profits. Whatever is done within the corporate structure, whether it appears to be good or evil, is done with that benchmark in mind. Effectively, the morality and ethics that ordinary folk live by goes right out the window. For these people, the only Truth is the savagery of the market; the only Good is the advancement of shareholder wealth.

I don't particularly enjoy violence. I tend to think that, if you reach the point where violence is the only way to solve a problem, you've failed in such a way that larger repercussions are inevitable. But for all the CEOs like Brian Thompson, violence against the rest of us is so commonplace they don't even recognize it as such. It's hard to feel much in the way of empathy for a man who helped create untold suffering across the country for years.

Even the most optimistic and conservative analysis shows that citizens of the United States are hurting on a massive scale

But even more important: what his murder tells me is that people everywhere are mad. Regardless of political ideologies, the rage at the heart of America is deep and profound.

Our systems are broken.

A report from The Commonwealth Fund shows that "nearly a quarter of working-age adults have insurance that leaves them underinsured," but that's just the beginning. Because this report doesn't even take into consideration "high costs owing to an insurance plan’s other design features, such as out-of-pocket maximums, copayments, or uncovered services." Even the most optimistic and conservative analysis shows that citizens of the United States are hurting on a massive scale.

The good news is: our systems can be fixed.

Other countries have shown us the path forward. It is possible to provide universal healthcare coverage to an entire population, to raise the standard of wellbeing, the standard of education, the standard of safety; it is possible to provide a platform for true democratic strength and security. We know it can be done.

Even our own flailing efforts the last fifteen years, through partially implemented efforts like the Affordable Care Act, have helped. But these have been bandages on the gangrenous wound in our society's side: corporate greed.

The Brian Thompson's of the world are servants of a corporate system designed to dehumanize and destroy.

A corporate system that doesn't respect faith or friendship.

A corporate system that disregards the worth of hearth and home.

It's that system that needs to be torn down.

If violence is a sign of systemic social failure, then the murder of Brian Thompson is a clarion call – a beacon of warning. We need to fix our shit now, before the trouble that's brewing gets out of hand.

The answer isn't going to be found in the arrest and prosecution of a sole assassin: but in the utter dismantling of the structure that made this assassination likely in the first place.