The CEO of UnitedHealthcare has been shot and killed in Manhattan by a man who arrived from out of town [1]. The bullet casings from the scene had written on them the words, delay, deny, and depose. An allusion to the practice of insurers to not fully and fairly review requests for care, instead creating a corporate culture and policy to delay responses to requests, deny requests wrongfully, and then defend the denial. Delay, Deny, Defend, with Defend altered to Depose. A counterpoint, a quip, a statement. If this, then that. Abide by the law, or dance outside of it with your aggrieved beneficiaries. I think that is a fair interpretation of the intent behind the selection of words.
Violence requires a capacity for function disabled adults like me don’t have. Which is part of why disabled adults are predominantly victims and not perpetrators. UHC has plenty of non-disabled beneficiaries though. I see the killing of UHC’s CEO as an inevitability. You can only push so many people so far until you push that one person with the means, ability, and mentality to act.
This being true in multiple domains; legal action, advocacy work, medical publications, extra legal and illegal activities.
Health insurance companies like UHC have corrupted and captured regulators, preventing reasonable and equitable recourse for consumers. They retain armies of lawyers for litigation and lobbyists to influence legislators. They made legal action an impossible barrier beneficiaries can’t effectively pursue or if they do can’t reliably win. Even if one wins their lawsuit they still come out injured and traumatized making victory hollow and somewhat meaningless.
Where then is justice left to be found but through alternative means? When you leave but one viable option left, someone somewhere is going to take it. The likelihood that occurs increases alongside the severity of the pressures requiring its use.
When UHC breaks the law over and over to deny, delay, and defend, how long until their abused and betrayed beneficiaries decide to reciprocate? I suppose we now have an answer to that.
From a systems perspective, UnitedHealthcare and their executives did this to themselves through their misconduct. If they don’t change their tune, they will likely have to live in fear from the beneficiaries that they are betraying [2].
Betrayal elicits the strongest of adverse emotional responses. It’s not going to go away, or fade with time. It builds, until rage overcomes the restraints that are required for civility.
When I contemplated what effective violence would look like as a regulating influence upon insurance misconduct, I envisioned something similar. Quite different, much larger in scope, more definitive, more like a movie script than real life, so hypothetical and unlikely as to seem no more than a mental exercise of ‘what if’, but still similar.
I don’t think killing the CEO will change UHC. I don’t think that is sufficient to get the psychopaths in UHC’s executive leadership to change course. I understand that anything on a larger scale is unachievable for an individual. I think UHC would have to provoke a group of special forces or combat Marines for violence which solves the health insurance misconduct problem to occur. Even then, odds of success would be slim.
Killing the CEO is little more than a protest or statement. It won’t stop the machine. It won’t even give it much pause. While I don’t think the actions of this shooter-with-a-grievance were without merit, from a big picture perspective it achieves very little. Violence against health plans is a strategy which I believe is ultimately futile. Perhaps less futile than this blog though. So maybe the joke is on me expecting people to read, care, and take action to Defend The Disabled from abusers like UnitedHealthcare Community Plan.
As likely as it is the CEO was just another part of a rotten to the core system, I don’t know if this shooter did their due diligence to be absolutely certain the CEO wasn’t trying to reform UHC, or do some good where possible. But, when you head a corrupt group, you become the figurehead of their corruption. Obvious target is obvious.
Obvious problem is also obvious, and has an obvious solution. Is UHC going to stop abusing and torturing their beneficiaries and operate with integrity in complete accord with the laws which protect their beneficiaries? Or will they just increase the CEOs bonus as a form of hazard pay, hire some corporate security goons, and double down on Delay, Deny, and Defend to pay for it?
Each possibility leads to predictable responses from beneficiaries, from a systems perspective.
I think it’ll be interesting to hear more about these events to understand what conditions are required for a person to go to the extreme of a targeted killing. The desperation required to feel so unheard there was no hope of meaningful arbitration occurring, that is not a small thing. Health plans have customer service, escalations, case management, prior authorizations, appeals, grievances, an executive office response team, and options for litigation and out of court settlement. All of it failed.
For people experienced in fighting with health plans for the care they’re entitled to, that failure is unsurprising. In fact I would say most of us would agree UHC health plans are designed to fail beneficiaries in order to maximize UHC profit. So it’s particularly fitting that its failure leads to their CEO being killed.
When pushed to an extreme degree people reciprocate; fight or flight. It’s a basic response in biological organisms, and certainly not exclusive to humans. The phrase “a cornered animal” expresses that fact. Predicting that this would occur is simply a matter of applying that fundamental comprehension of organism behaviors. This isn’t just animals I’m talking about, we observe similar behaviors in cellular organisms, especially in communities of microorganisms. This most basic concept of responding to a threat to mitigate or resolve that threat is fundamental game theory, systems thinking, and essential biology. There’s very little political agenda involved in the conclusions from my analysis.
It’s common knowledge history repeats itself, and evolutionary biology is quite the extensive history to learn from. One could say the UHC CEO being shot and killed is like a Darwin award for health insurance plans.
As I said, from a systems perspective UHC’s misconduct did this to themselves. Much like the many beneficiaries who suffer injury or premature death due to wrongful denials of care, this killing of UHC’s CEO was entirely and completely preventable, but what needed to occur wasn’t allowed to occur because of delay, deny, and defend, leading us now to “depose”.
There is but one word left to offer: Karma.
References:
- Minyvonne Burke, Tim Stelloh. (Dec 6, 2024). What we know about UnitedHealthcare CEO’s fatal shooting outside NYC hotel. Retrieved: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/unitedhealthcare-ceo-shooting-brian-thompson-suspect-what-know-rcna183155
- Delanian, Ken. <(Dec 5, 2024). Insurance executive’s killing sparks online praise and hate. Retrieved: https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/insurance-executives-murder-sparks-online-praise-hate-rcna183017
Defend The Disabled 