The arrest in the slaying of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was the first step to putting his alleged killer behind bars, though it won’t end the power struggle in health care illuminated by public reaction afterward.
Another wave of criticism rose against Minnetonka-based UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest health insurer, and the broader insurance industry following the arrest on Monday of Luigi Mangione. The 26-year-old scion of a wealthy Maryland family was charged with murder for allegedly shooting Thompson last Wednesday outside a hotel in New York, where the executive was headed to an investor conference.
A new extreme in the diatribes online emerged: entrepreneurs selling fake UnitedHealth T-shirts with the words that were written on bullet casings found at the shooting scene. Amazon removed some such merchandise from its e-commerce store.
In a column last Friday, I tried to place the “absence of empathy” for Thompson in the context of other news events, ranging from mass shootings to goof-ups by athletes in their sport. I also tried to convey the powerlessness that many Americans feel about health care. And I ended by writing that killing people and acting rudely online are unlikely to solve the problems.
Readers stuffed my email box with feedback, the most for anything I’ve written this year. I took that as another sign of the strong feelings and conflict surrounding health care in America. While some readers said I conveyed the tension well, more wrote that I seemed oblivious to the anger people feel toward those with power over them in health care.
“To tell people they should be sad or respectful when someone they view as bad dies, just makes it seem like they should forget all the harm caused,” reader Emily R. from Isanti County wrote.
“For people still paying off piles of medical debt because of denied claims, people who lost someone because they could not afford insulin or other meds, it is the only sense of justice that they will ever get. Then you came along and scolded them for being mean,” she added.
UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, has said nothing publicly about the outcry, though others in the insurance industry have. UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty, who was Thompson’s boss, addressed it in a video to employees that leaked on Friday.