End For-Profit Healthcare
Early in the morning of December 4, in downtown Manhattan, a masked gunman fatally shot 50-year-old Brian Thompson. Thompson was the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, America’s largest private health insurance company, and his killer was waiting for him as he left his hotel for a shareholders’ meeting. Five days later on December 9, after a huge manhunt, the suspected killer was captured and identified as 26-year-old Luigi Mangione.
The health insurance industry is nothing more than a parasite on society, with no purpose but to make billions of dollars for the already-wealthy by forcing working people to pay huge sums for insurance that then refuses to cover much actual medical care. United Healthcare’s annual profits have shot up by nearly 400 percent due to the company now reportedly denying nearly one in three medical claims.
Thompson, as the CEO of United Healthcare, personally profited from the deaths and suffering of sick and dying people and the crippling debt inflicted on them and their families. But because capitalism values profit above all else, Thompson was just one monster in a house full of horrors, and another soulless creep has already crawled in to “carry on his legacy” as UHC’s new CEO.
Millions still feel abject desperation at seeing no clear way to end the suffering we and our loved ones face at the hands of the rich and powerful. The outpouring of support for Mangione on social media shows that millions of us are dreaming of a world without CEOs, but we can’t make that world a reality through individual acts of violence. We need a working-class revolution to end for-profit healthcare and build a society that doesn’t run on the profit motive at all. Taking down one CEO won’t end our suffering—we have to take down their entire system.
For-Profit Healthcare Runs On Murder
It’s not surprising that United Healthcare was targeted. The whole health insurance industry is rotten, and UHC is the worst of the worst, with a long track record of denying necessary medical care. They are valued at $561 billion and took in profits of $22 billion in 2023. Brian Thompson took home compensation of $10 million that year and has been sued for insider trading. During his leadership of United Health Care, its valuation almost doubled as it pioneered new ways to deny claims using AI, waste patients’ and healthcare workers’ time, and destroy lives for profit.
This event has sparked a massive telling and retelling of health insurance horror stories by patients and doctors. A 20-year-old woman died from a sinus infection after her health insurance application was lost in red tape, delaying her treatment until she sought emergency care. A paralyzed stroke patient had her rehab cut off after only 20 days. A friend of this author was stuck with an $11,207.95 bill for a rabies shot after her insurance was suddenly cut off when she left her university program. It is in this context that United Healthcare’s official Facebook announcement of Thompson’s death received upwards of 90,000 laugh reactions and far fewer reactions of any other kind.
The health insurance industry runs on what Friedrich Engels called “social murder”—the killing of millions not by outright violence, but the result of capitalist policies, in this case the profit-driven denial of the healthcare people need. All health insurance profits come from charging people more for premiums than gets paid out in healthcare. The purpose of any insurance is simply to spread unpredictable costs across a population, and so any profit collected is taken out of benefits and is directly parasitic towards the people insured.
Profit is what our capitalist society is built around maximizing. So, every single healthcare decision in this country is first made by a doctor, but then second-guessed by a bureaucratic, profit-thirsty insurance company with no medical expertise or familiarity with the patient, whose direct incentive is to deny as much healthcare as they can. Every minute spent on this by healthcare providers, insurance industry workers, or frustrated patients is a counterproductive waste. The entire health insurance industry should not exist. Everyone who works in it should be re-employed in a socially useful job, like actually providing healthcare, and a not-for-profit government program should insure everyone with minimal complexity at low cost.
Take Down the Whole System
This status quo is defended by both our corporate political parties. Barack Obama campaigned for president on the issue of single-payer healthcare in 2008. After he won, the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for the first two years of his term. But Obama refused to implement the single-payer healthcare system he promised, which would have decimated the insurance industry that funds political campaigns on both sides of the aisle. What passed instead was a meagre reform known as Obamacare. When Trump later threatened to repeal Obamacare, working people flooded town hall meetings across the country to demand the law stay in place. Neither party will ever be willing to actually go after the profits of big insurance.
As a result of this circle of corruption and graft, the US spends far more on healthcare than any other country while achieving far worse outcomes than other rich countries. By suffocating any real left alternative and then pretending that everything is fine, both establishment political parties are just as responsible for this situation as the health insurance companies they work for.
This assassination reflects the justified anger of millions of working-class people. However, it also reflects widespread disorganization and pessimism at the potential of mass movements to win change. Assassinations cannot solve our problems. They give the capitalist state the justification to increase surveillance and repression, and capitalism can always replace its servants. Individual political violence does more to encourage working-class people to wait for someone else to save them than it does to empower them to play an active role in collectively fighting back.
When Bernie Sanders was running for president, he called for universal healthcare under the banner of Medicare For All and mobilized millions to canvass for him. This showed how many people would take action if they saw a viable political alternative. Tragically, he refused to break with the Democratic Party, which immediately backstabbed him in service of its donors like the health insurance industry even though this caused them to lose to Donald Trump in 2016. In the vacuum left by a mass campaign for universal healthcare, it’s not surprising that some people will turn to desperate solutions like individual violence.
We need mass action and collective organization, but on a far more radical basis than Bernie’s Democratic Party campaigns. To stop all greedy CEOs, we need to end capitalism. Right now, we need a bold party of the working class, independent from and opposed to all capitalist parties, using strikes and mass actions to win victories like free universal healthcare. It is these methods that have erased parasitic industries and even overthrown corrupt empires in the past. A party like this could recruit angry young people in the thousands or millions to a more effective, and less self-destructive, approach than assassinations. We owe it to ourselves and each other to build a socialist movement worthy of the burning desire for change felt by young and working-class people throughout America.
