The dream has apparently come to an end at a McDonald’s in Altoona Pennsylvania. For a few days, the United States public was enthralled by the brazen killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The subsequent outpouring of support for the shooter startled many people in positions of power and presented at least the appearance of an opportunity for widespread ‘class consciousness’. Social media pulsed with speculation and praise for ‘The Adjuster’ and reveled in the NYPD’s struggle to track down the suspect. In spite of media and government officials’ efforts at shaming, the overall sentiment on TikTok and Reddit seemed to be on a spectrum with indifference on one end and bloodlust on the other.

The general lack of sympathy for the victim or outrage over the crime is not, if we are honest with ourselves, overly surprising. In an industry already hated for its commodification of medicine and unapologetic business-first approach to healthcare, UnitedHealthcare is particularly reviled. The company, itself only the best-known component of a conglomerate touching virtually all aspects of healthcare, has long been criticized for its resistance to pay claims (reportedly using artificial intelligence to deny claims en masse) as well as its tortuous medication approval processes and so news of its chief executive’s sudden and spectacular demise was met with little weeping. The shooter instantly became seen as a kind of Equalizer, the corporeal manifestation of the American people’s fantasy of striking back at their corporate overlords and the perceived masters of the universe. The social networks buzzed with comments suggesting the crime was (or should be) the opening salvo against the executive class and the shooter was the standard-bearer for a peasant revolt,

These notions were overblown. Instead of igniting the flames of class warfare and bringing on an American version of storming the Bastille, the killing merely gave people a macabre outlet for voicing their very valid frustrations towards the healthcare industry in general and the insurance cabals in particular. Despite some evidence of bipartisan solidarity and its revolutionary undertones, the event proved less a rallying cry for a popular uprising and more a sudden clap of thunder that quickly faded. Brian Thompson’s death accomplished nothing other than a momentary knee-jerk reaction from the masses – the architects of misery that paid him to take figurative (and, in this case, literal) bullets for the company remain, their policies continue and the system barely registered his passing. UHC posted boilerplate condolences, but the machinery of industrialized healthcare cannot rest and so the best the company could offer him was a few obligatory remarks about how he will be missed and the like – even Thompson’s “dear friend[s]” couldn’t be bothered to let their sadness interrupt business as usual.

And ‘business as usual’ is exactly what UHC returned to. The company did (despite popular opinions to the contrary) cancel the investor meeting Thompson was heading to, but that slight interruption was all the sacrifice the healthcare colossus endured. There has been no reported soul searching at UHC, no emergency meetings to discuss the potentially violent response to their policies, no sober efforts to understand how the company’s actions even might have contributed to the killing. The mainstream media has not been helping matters either – a quick internet search will find more thought being put into the topics of executive security and the killing’s impact on healthcare shareholders than any discussion on how those executives might be creating more Luigi Mangiones or how enriching shareholders creates enormous burdens on the insured.

Lastly, there has been nothing said in the commercial media about whether this was, even in the most hypothetical sense, a justifiable killing. I would like to begin by saying that I believe killing Brian Thompson was not justified, but not because of some Puritanical notion that extrajudicial killings are always unjustified. I’m reminded of the popular ‘trolley problem‘, a thought exercise used to weigh the ethical/moral validity of two unpleasant outcomes (basically posing the question which is the lesser evil). In its most fundamental form, a trolley is hurtling down the track and approaches a junction. On one track is a single person, on the other track is more than one person (e.g. 5). If an observer takes no action, the trolley will kill the five people. If the observer diverts the trolley by throwing a switch, the trolley will kill the one person. There are a multitude of variables that can be added to further complicate the dilemma (e.g. the five people are murderers but the single person is a serial killer), but the basic question is whether action yields a more ‘acceptable’ outcome than inaction.

In the case of Brian Thompson’s murder, we could construct a trolley problem in which we have Thompson on the secondary track and people insured through UHC on the primary track. If we assume that, as CEO of the company, Thompson was directly or indirectly responsible for the suffering of millions of sick and injured Americans (through the mechanisms described above), an observer (in this case his killer) has the options of acting (throwing the switch) and having Thompson eliminated or doing nothing and allowing the system to run over an untold number of insured. If the ‘vigilante killer’ narrative is true, the observer clearly selected action. This construct, however, only works if eliminating Thompson (or any healthcare CEO for that matter) actually affects change. As we have seen, one executive’s demise, even a high-ranking one, is insufficient to create the change the system desperately needs. In this particular trolley problem, the action or inaction of the observer is immaterial as there is a freight train following the trolley that will crush everyone on the primary track whether the switch is thrown or not.

The American people are so hungry for systemic and swift change in healthcare (and other aspects of life) that the murder of an ultimately inconsequential healthcare executive became something of a call to arms. The overlapping systems of corporate media, high finance and for-profit healthcare have become so prevalent and demoralizing that many people cheered when Brian Thompson was gunned down. The shooter became a symbol of resistance to corporate tyranny, an avenging angel sent to punish the elites that have, through their rapacity and hubris, built for themselves a modern-day serfdom. Sadly for us all, Brian Thompson was merely one head of the hydra and cutting it off was only a mild discomfort for a system whose roots run through every layer of government and society and it will take more than a single pruning to bring the parasitic weed under control.