What if Brian Thompson Was the Canary in the Coalmine?

Are we heading into a time of class war fueled by the rage against corporate greed?

AI Image created with Midjourney.

“Is this how it begins?” That was my first thought when I read about Brian Thompson’s shooting in Manhattan. Not “Oh my God,” not “The poor family.” No, “Is this how it begins?”

Looking back, that’s a strange and callous reaction to a cold-blooded murder. I’ve never thought of myself as insensitive. I’m well aware that this is a tragedy for his family and friends and that there are people who love this man who are currently in pain and grieving.

I’ve been trying to understand why I felt this incident was inevitable and why I sensed that this public killing of a CEO could have been an act of resistance.

At that time, nothing was known besides the fact that a man in a black hoodie and a face mask had calmly shot and killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the middle of Manhattan and fled on a bike.

There could have been any number of reasons why this happened. But, solely based on these two pieces of information, my brain went to a place where Thompson was killed as retribution for the misdeeds of the inhumane healthcare corporation he headed.

And if you’ve been on social media these past two days, millions of people’s minds went to the same place.

Since then, we have learned that the casings found at the scene have messages supposedly saying “Depose, Deny, Delay,” an obvious allusion to the “Delay, Deny, Defend” tactics insurances use to avoid paying claims.

Delay approval and payment, deny legitimate claims for bogus reasons. Defend your decision by all legal means in a way that looks like they’re hoping the claimant will go away and preferably die before they have to part with their money.

For the past 48 hours, the internet has been full of horrendous stories of people losing their health and their livelihood over wrongly denied insurance claims.

Like this story by Cody Jacob

As someone who lives in a country with universal, social healthcare, the brutal unfairness and hardship of the American healthcare system is hard to stomach. Especially in the light of conservative and neoliberal politicians’ constant push to dismantle our social security system. It feels like I’m looking into a possible dystopian future for all of us.

A future where people will feel killing the CEO of a corporation is a legitimate route of resistance. Because this is what could happen when corporations exploit people within an inch of their lives.

The UnitedHealth Group is the world’s ninth-largest company by revenue. Not the ninth-largest insurance company. Not the ninth largest in America. No, the ninth-largest company overall, globally! It’s mind-boggling how big a business American people’s health is, right?

Over the past 10 years, the company’s annual revenue rose from $130.5 billion to $371.6 billion in 2023. At the same time, profit rose from $5.6 billion to $22.4 billion. This year, in September, they reported making $393.9 billion over the last 12 months.

I know we all have difficulty visualizing and relating to large numbers. So let me help you out. If you earned the 2023 median annual salary of full-time workers in the US: $56,000 and worked for 40 years, you’d have to work 9821 lifetimes to make that kind of money.

9821 lifetimes for the money they make for their shareholders in one year. Off of people’s health or sickness or, to be more precise, people’s despair.

If you’re insured through them, you can expect them to make your life miserable when you fall ill. By denying your claims for everything from the reimbursement of your flu shot to the hospital bill of your child who died of brain cancer.

And these days, they won’t even bother to look at your claim before they deny it. They’ve invested in the new bane of civilization and use AI. They carefully chose not just any algorithm but one with a 90% error rate to make the experience as terrible as possible. As Arstechnica reported last year, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of two people who supposedly died due to this practice:

The lawsuit is brought by the estates of two deceased people who were denied health coverage by UnitedHealth. The suit also seeks class-action status for similarly situated people, of which there may be tens of thousands across the country.

In 2022, RetireGuide reported that 66,5% of bankruptcies in the U.S. were due to medical debt.

Should you fail to see the significance of these numbers, let me entertain you with the following global data. The graphic visualizes the percentage of people who went bankrupt in 2024 due to medical bills per country.

Source World Population Review

Interesting right? No country in the Western world sucks its sick people dry like the U.S. No country even comes close to the exploitation you see in the U.S.

But these numbers are cold and abstract. They can’t convey the suffering behind these numbers. You can only get an idea if you listen to people’s heartbreaking stories.

On Threads, I stumbled across a post by li.michaels who once worked for UnitedHealth:

I worked for United Healthcare in a call centre in my early twenties. I lasted about six months. The call that broke me was a woman calling in about a bill she received.

She had lost her six year old to a brain tumour. They were planning the funeral and they got notice that they were being sued by a doctor because UH hadn't paid a nearly 1.4 million dollar claim.

I couldn't really help her. Our call centre was for checking if something was in network or covered. But I could see the claim.

The comments are full of people relating their horrendous experiences with UnitedHealth and their peers. Read them if you want to lose faith in the humanity of the system we live in. And maybe these stories should be required reading for the people who decide what your life and death are worth.

People are rightfully angry, and that anger is erupting. The common vibe seems to be that Thompson deserved to be killed. Mind you, people dying from AI-denied claims might have a lot to do with that sentiment.

Maybe it’s not the best idea to maximize profit at the cost of people’s health.

So far, the anger is still contained to social media, but what if Brian Thompson’s shooter is only the first person to feel they have nothing left to lose? What if Brian Thompson was the canary in the coal mine? Maybe, like the canaries miners took with them into the depths, he was the first one to die when the atmosphere became too toxic.

Will we look back at these years of late-stage capitalism, greedflation and callous disregard of basic human rights and say, “This was where it began?”

I firmly believe that certain communal services should never be run for profit because people’s well-being is at stake. People aren’t there to support the economy. The economy is there to support the people.

Healthcare, education, water supply, energy and public transport should always be funded and owned by the community, not by corporations. Housing should be a basic right. No one should have to file bankruptcy due to an illness, lose their house and die in the streets in a world where someone owns a fucking boat that cost $500 million to build and $22 million in annual upkeep.

Despite what uber-rich people are trying to make you believe, neither their contributions to society nor they are that much more valuable than you and I. Nobody deserves this kind of wealth.

And people are catching on to this.

In the past months, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with people who are suddenly seeing the cracks in the system. Who are confused as to why they suddenly see extreme price hikes, why they have energy bills three times as high as they used to while their paycheck isn’t increasing.

At the same time, corporations announce record profits.

The current atmosphere feels like the sinking of the Titanic while the band plays a lively tune. We already feel the icy water on our calves. Maybe people will start taking out their fear and rage on the captains who steered us into the iceberg.

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