Why CEO’s New York killing was met with such dark glee

The murder last week of 50-year-old Brian Thompson, CEO of US health insurer UnitedHealthcare, at dawn on Wednesday morning outside the Hilton hotel in midtown Manhattan was greeted with – no other word for it – glee by many.

Thompson was, by my ancient sights anyway, a youngish man with two kids, 19 and 16, and an estranged wife. In almost any other case, the response to the murder of a father would be met with horror. It should be met with horror. Here’s why it wasn’t. The abuse of ordinary citizens by corporate and government power is too often met with a cavalier lack of interest. The response tells me the non-1 per cent is furious and this was their fantasy revenge. The arrest of Luigi Mangione, 26, unleashed even more sympathy for the suspect.

Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth’s insurance unit, was fatally shot outside a Manhattan hotel.Credit: AP

What’s gone wrong here? Is this a new class warfare?

Thompson ran what has been described as among the most rapacious of all the US health insurance companies. In the past, I’m sure that’s made its shareholders happy. Thompson oversaw soaring profitability during his lengthy tenure at the company. Now his colleagues are claiming he tried to fix the problem.

That may not be how the alleged murderer saw it, evidently. Engraved on the bullet casings, from a so-called ghost gun, were the words too often found in correspondence from health insurers to their customers (or victims, should I say): deny and delay. Those words echoed the title of an influential 2010 book about predatory insurance company practices by Rutgers emeritus law professor Jay M. Feinman: Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.

What I’ve read of the book is horrific (I did try to interview Feinman on Monday morning, but he wasn’t taking calls). Feinman explains that insurance is meant to be a deal – a promise between two parties, one paying the premium, the other promising to bear the risk.

But let me highlight the entire point of the book with this one paragraph: “Beginning in the 1990s, many major insurance companies reconsidered this understanding of the claims process. The insight was simple. An insurance company’s greatest expense is what it pays out in claims. If it pays out less in claims, it keeps more in profits. Therefore, the claims department became a profit centre rather than the place that kept the company’s promise.”

Luigi Mangione, the man suspected of killing Brian Thompson, is now in custody. Credit: ABC

We certainly have predatory behaviour in this country. The victims are almost always people with no buffer, no power, no familiarity with process. This is the collateral damage of inequality, the defenceless and disenfranchised with no hope of protecting themselves.

We’ve seen banks charge the dead – and the living – for services no one’s getting. We’ve seen telcos knowingly sell to those who can’t afford the services, can’t even understand what they are buying. But nothing beats successive governments for the predacious behaviour known in this country as robo-debt. This week, the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) referred the federal government to the Commonwealth Ombudsman following new revelations that, once again, income support payments may have been illegally cancelled, affecting more than 1000 people between April 2022 (not long before the Albanese government was elected) and July this year. Robo-debt was conceived and then hand-reared by the Coalition.

ACOSS chief executive Cassandra Goldie says the government must understand the system affects hundreds of thousands of people who are at risk of deprivation, suicide, and poverty.

“Someone receiving JobSeeker is 14 times more likely to go without a substantial meal at least once a day, and suicide rates among people receiving these payments are 4.5 times higher than that of the broader population.”

In this country, our most deprived – our most demeaned and degraded – are more likely to kill themselves, not their violators.

Ben Spies-Butcher, associate professor of economy and society at Macquarie University, promises me that the US situation, where money is extorted from those in very precarious situations under the guise of insurance, is much more extreme than what we experience in Australia.

“It’s not yet at the scale of US inequality,” he says. But that predacious mindset is evident in successive governments’ conduct of robo-debt. There is, he says, “the importance of vigilance to make sure we don’t get to that point”.

But even Spies-Butcher was surprised by the response to Thompson’s murder: “It suggests a very deep divide and a lot of anger.”

This was not just the kind of joy you might find in the deep recesses of the dark web where some share multiple derangements – but on the streets where some claim Thompson deserved it, on TikTok where one poster claimed US health problems could be solved by unregulated gun laws, on Reddit where posters were unsurprised these kinds of attacks weren’t more common, and even in that most banal capitalist portfolio LinkedIn.

How did these companies respond in the wake of the murder? Not with the kind of reflective behaviour you might expect. Instead, most stripped their websites of any information about their leadership and called for more services from security firms.

The New York Times reported that Stephan Meier, chair of the management division at Columbia Business School, said the attack could send shock waves through the broader health insurance industry.

“The insurance industry is not the most loved, to put it mildly,” Meier said. “If you’re a C-suite executive of another insurance company, I would be thinking, ‘What’s this mean for me? Am I next?’”

It’s clear we need kinder and more civilised capitalism in this country – in all countries – and we need leadership from the very top down. We must all remember banking royal commissioner Kenneth Hayne, who underscored for all of us that companies needed a social license to operate. Companies – and governments – need to do more than make a profit. And we, together, must hold them all to account. Murder doesn’t do that.

How should companies respond? I asked Macquarie’s Spies-Butcher. “By ensuring ethical practice and doing as much as they can to ensure that those in precarious situations are helped,” he said. “That’s an obligation for everyone.”

Jenna Price is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and a regular columnist.

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