Hit on a CEO

Is this a “John Wick-meets-Erin Brockovich” murder, or something else altogether? Yesterday morning, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot in Midtown Manhattan in what authorities say looks like a targeted attack.

The killer was masked, and his gun was outfitted with a silencer. He “apparently knew which door Mr. Thompson was going to enter and arrived outside the hotel about five minutes earlier,” per a New York Times report. After he killed Thompson, the shooter fled via e-bike. He has yet to be apprehended.

United provides healthcare coverage to almost 50 million people, bringing in $281 billion in revenue and paying Thompson more $10.2 million in total compensation package annually. 

Normally, when someone is tragically murdered (God rest his soul), it would not be customary to mention their comp package. But it’s unfortunately relevant to this story because hordes of people have seized on this murder, acting like it was warranted because a healthcare company CEO must be, in their telling, quite evil. Some have theorized that it’s a spurned patient, someone who was deeply wronged, who may have a vendetta against Thompson. That is possible, but we don’t know enough yet.

Some people have taken to celebrating this theoretical vigilantism, like prominent journalist Taylor Lorenz, who in few words has suggested that more CEOs be gone after due to their perceived misdeeds.

— Taylor Lorenz (@taylorlorenz.bsky.social) 2024-12-04T21:31:56.268Z

“And people wonder why we want these executives dead” she wrote yesterday on the same site.

“No shit murder is bad,” wrote journalist Ken Klippenstein on the platform Bluesky, which appears to mostly be for people who’ve exited X in a huff. “The jokes about the United CEO aren’t really about him; they’re about the rapacious healthcare system he personified and which Americans feel deep pain and humiliation about.”

Today we remember the legacy of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein.bsky.social) 2024-12-04T16:30:54.583Z

In 2021, the company came under fire because it announced a plan to start denying payment for emergency room visits deemed unnecessary (something competitors also intended to do). “Threatening patients with a financial penalty for making the wrong decision could have a chilling effect on seeking emergency care,” wrote the chief executive of the trade group American Hospital Association at the time.

But consider the incentives here: Of course an industry trade group representing hospitals wants more use of services, and thus more payout. And of course the entity doing the paying out wants to ensure patients are judicious and there’s less overuse of expensive services. Everyone is playing their part perfectly here; there’s not really a bad actor, per se—just two oppositional parties responding to incentives.

But it’s that type of nuance that the pro-socialized-healthcare murder cheerleaders keep missing: This system sure is broken. There’s no price transparency, and thus it’s very hard to exercise real choice before you receive a service. Upcoding—when healthcare providers play fast and loose with the billing codes to get more reimbursement from either insurance companies or the government—happens all the time. Regulatory requirements constantly drive up costs. Customers are not well served by this, but it’s not really the individual companies that are to blame, let alone the people who run them. 

This isn’t to say United never does anything wrong. One ProPublica investigation covered how the company attempted to deny coverage to a chronically ill college student, and how his family sued. This type of denial of coverage happens to a not-insignificant number of claims, and there are plenty of tragic stories of patients who were wronged. Alternatives like socialized medicine, administered by the government, don’t create much better outcomes. (Government actors also respond to incentives, don’t you know.)

as a thriller writer I regret to inform everyone that the John Wick-meets-Erin Brockovich theory of the insurance CEO murder (i.e. an act of revenge for corporate greed) is by far the least likely to prove out, its immense popularity nonwithstanding

— Kat Rosenfield (@katrosenfield) December 5, 2024

CEOs like Thompson aren’t cartoon villains twisting their mustaches, and Bluesky venting about how much you want the guillotine to come for them doesn’t fix a broken system or make you morally decent. Though the popular theory is that a hit man must have been hired by a patient who has egregiously wronged by the company, this ignores that people who have a hard time paying their medical bills infrequently have wads of cash laying around to infuse into an assassin’s pockets. More information will come out over the coming weeks, and in the meantime, let’s just all agree to ignore journalists on Bluesky. 

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out: Gary Gensler, current chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, will soon be out, replaced by Donald Trump’s pick, Paul Atkins. Atkins “served as a Republican Commissioner from 2002 to 2008 during the post-Enron climate when the SEC sought to expand its reach in the name of preventing fraud,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “He frequently criticized the agency for needlessly meddling in markets by issuing rules that raised costs for public companies and investors.”

Atkins is no opponent of crypto; the price of bitcoin shot up after the pick was announced, rising 6.1 percent to $103,801 this morning. Atkins has been critical of ESG standards (which the Journal rightly adds “bully public companies into advancing the left’s climate and cultural agenda”) and the SEC mandating greenhouse-gas emission disclosures. He’s an all-around great pick, and a welcome corrective given the years of SEC harassment the crypto industry has endured.

Scenes from New York: A major pro-building housing plan is expected to be approved by city council.

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• “A large number of Americans’ metadata has been stolen in the sweeping cyberespionage campaign carried out by a Chinese hacking group dubbed ‘Salt Typhoon,’” per Reuters. “We believe a large number of Americans’ metadata was taken,” a senior U.S. official told the newswire. “We do not believe it’s every cell phone in the country, but we believe it’s potentially a large number of individuals that the Chinese government was focused on.”
• Economist Russ Roberts has a great thread about the health care system and the discourse surrounding Thompson’s murder.

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