The fatal shooting of Brian Thompson

A senseless killing

Images released by the City of New York Police Department of the individual suspected of having committed the act of homicide against Mr Brian Thompson in that city on 4 December 2024. The culprit is still at large.¹

There is much killing in the world, and pretty much all of it is senseless. So, when Mrs Thompson describes her husband, Brian’s, slaying on a New York street this morning as precisely that, she is in no way off the mark.

When, this New Year, we, with God’s good grace, wish each other health, wealth and happiness, however, and especially for those ensconced in the healthcare systems of the United States, of those three wishes, none will be more crucial to the second than the first; and if that works out okay, you may yet have a year of the third.

UnitedHealthcare, the company headed up by the late Mr Thompson, has been identified in the past (fair to say, as have most health insurers in the US) as operating a favoured agency system, by setting up the very bodies that intervene between patient and insurer in making healthcare cover decisions, and as engaging in the practice of wholesale rejection of claims under the policies that it writes. One such example is reported here.

As you can read, health insurers, and insurers generally, engage in practices that are not far removed from the audacious attack on Mr Thompson in terms of their brazenness, and not few of which have, in their time, also led to senseless deaths.

Without labouring the point, I invite you to dip into the many (I’ve counted about 100) articles on the website of the respected investigative journalism organisation ProPublica, which name UnitedHealthcare alone, not to mention all the other healthcare insurance companies active on the American, or many another, market.

The trend these days is to simply deny cover, even when cover is patent. One investigation reveals that insured persons appeal such denials in 0.1 per cent of cases, which comes to a whopping saving for the insurer. It’s like wage theft, which can be seen as a mirror image of this practice: steal your employees’ wages, and very few will even realise you’ve done it. Fewer will appeal. And no one will listen even if they go to court. Upon which event, you simply fire them.

New York’s law enforcers are, rightly, keeping their cards close to their chest in terms of the motive behind the clearly well-planned assassination this morning. But, while Mrs Thompson obviously mourns the loss of a fine husband and father, it is nonetheless true that the company that Mr Thompson captained until this morning was responsible for the losses of many husbands and fathers, wives and mothers, of its own volition.

This murder is no way to bring about reform of the insurance market, not by a long chalk. But it should allow the practices of insurers at least to come to the table as a motive for the powerless who perhaps, just perhaps, are slowly reaching boiling point: as a talking point.

Aside from those two, Mrs Thompson is precisely correct: her husband’s killing was pointless.

1. A suspect has now been arrested [update 14 December 2024].