Why Many Americans Don't Feel Worse About a UnitedHealthcare CEO's Murder

By Stacy Torres

Confession time. I’m having difficulty mustering much sympathy for the brazen and targeted murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, shot outside a Hilton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan as he walked to a shareholders meeting.

And apparently, I’m not alone. The intrigue-filled assassination has drawn the ire of Americans fuming at a health insurance industry that prioritizes profits over people’s lives. Social media reactions have ranged from dark, sarcastic humor to outright cheers, compelling UnitedHealthcare to turn off comments on a Facebook post about the murder when 41,000 of 46,000 reactions were laughing emojis. One user wrote, "My thoughts & prayers were out of network." I couldn’t help but chuckle grimly.

Being a patient is hard work—and getting harder. In a seminal paper, medical sociologists at the University of California, San Francisco—Anselm L. Strauss, Shizuko Fagerhaugh, Barbara Suczek, and Carolyn Wiener—conceived of patients’ participation in their own care as “patient work,” highlighting their critical efforts as more than simply “good cooperation.” The authors outline the often unrecognized, explicit and implicit work that patients do, from self-monitoring their bodies and machines during dialysis sessions and completing physical therapy exercises to the subtler psychological task of maintaining composure and courage in the face of extreme pain or a life-threatening diagnosis. Increasingly, persevering through time- and energy-draining negotiations with health insurance companies has formed a major component of the work that patients are forced to do outside of a hospital or doctor’s office.

Unlike some, I’m not celebrating the Thompson killing. But I’m also not shedding any tears. Nor will I condemn the valid emotions of people who’ve experienced immense harm. Some news coverage has employed a scolding, finger-wagging tone, such as a piece from The Washington Post’s Editorial Board that drew thousands of critical comments.

At times, I even caught myself secretly hoping the suspect would continue to successfully evade police, recalling that final scene from The Silence of the Lambs in which Hannibal Lecter disappears into the crowd after making his tropical escape. I’ve felt guilty about that. What’s wrong with me, why don’t I feel sorrier? I’ve asked myself. Strands of my biography that I imagined would encourage greater empathy—losing a parent early (Thompson left behind two teenage sons); working in a nursing school on a health sciences campus; and having a chronic illness, instead fueled my growing anger.

Having grown up in New York City, where the stops on the suspect’s itinerary are as familiar to me as the back of my own hand, I’m not surprised that the twists and turns in the police manhunt riveted me. But even more captivating than those close-to-home details straight out of a suspense thriller, are the personal testimonies spilling forth from Americans how the health insurance industry has harmed them. Countless stories of damage and desperation, each worse than the next, have formed the grizzly core of a gory scene I can’t shield my eyes from—the denial of life-saving treatment, medication, and medical equipment for advanced cancer, ALS, suicidal depression—you name it. 

I have an autoimmune disease that has necessitated extensive interaction with health insurance companies for two decades now. As a long-time family caregiver for a disabled sister and two parents that died of cancer, tack on some more years of vicarious suffering as I witnessed my parents terrorized by lagging authorizations and denied claims, plagued with intense worry about how to pay off bill collectors. In the era before GoFundMe drives, my family was buried under medical debt related to my sister’s surgery and rehabilitation from a dislocated hip at birth, leaving no other option but to go bankrupt.

At this perverse cultural and political moment, lately, only Hollywood has offered me a way to make sense of the rage I’m carrying inside.

“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” The quote-worthy line from the iconic 1970s film Network has buzzed in my brain since Thompson’s slaying. In the film, newscaster Howard Beale offers a tirade more relevant than ever to our social and economic fears and frustrations, urging his viewers to take to their windows and yell their collective fury.

Yup, me too. I’m also mad as hell: Mad as hell that my mother’s health insurance stopped covering her home hospice, and her nurses kept coming unpaid out of pity and the goodness of their hearts. Mad as hell that my dear friend Esther had to go home to die in Barcelona from metastatic breast cancer at age 55 so she could access Spain’s universal healthcare.

Mad as hell that my partner’s friends back in his native Austria don’t worry about a bad diagnosis leading to financial ruin—this peace of mind an unthinkable luxury for us in the United States. And mad as hell that my student who died in mid-November, ten months after a rare cancer diagnosis, had to worry with our graduate program about how to keep her health insurance coverage, when the only thing that should be on anyone’s mind when faced with such a terrifying diagnosis is savoring those precious, fleeting moments of life we can never take for granted.

But sadly, I am going to take it, because what other choice do I have?

This recent groundswell of collective fury has forced me to confront my own feelings of powerlessness. As a sociologist who has researched older adults’ experiences with the healthcare system and taught health policy, for years I’ve pondered such harms. But this killing has shaken me loose from the grips of national gaslighting by the insurance industry, which has inured me to the indignities of fighting and pleading for my own health and that of my family, friends, and neighbors. This is not normal. We should feel outrage. Shared anger has filled me with relief—and incredible sadness—that I’m not the only one.

Where do we go from here? With powerful political and business interests aligned with propping up the current private health insurance industry, I’m not optimistic about the prospects of reform or a single-payer system. But I’m not entirely hopeless either. As sick and tired as I am, I’m still committed to non-violent advocacy for decent and respectful healthcare, grateful for Senator Bernie Sanders’ longtime fight for Medicare for All and to organizations such as People’s Action for offering a model of peaceful protest.

In the meantime, as I use the last few weeks of the year to pause, reflect, and recharge for an uncertain year, the only thing I know for certain is that I see a holiday movie marathon in my future. No Elf, A Christmas Story, or It’s a Wonderful Life for me. Rather, I’ll return to those movies with the villains, outlaws, and anti-heroes I hate to love—Bonnie and Clyde, Taxi Driver, The Joker—and try to understand what I’ve learned about myself and my callous reaction to the loss of one man’s life so that I can rekindle my efforts to work harder on behalf of countless others.

 

 

Comments

[Jeremy]

📝 I can’t believe how detailed and well-explained this post is. It’s exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for sharing such helpful tips! 💡
https://www-indigens9.com