"He Held Many Anti-Corporate Views."

The UHG CEO Assassin Had A View Shared by Many on the Far Left and the Right; It's a Sign of the Extremism of the Times We Now Live In.

Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare since 2021, was shot and killed (outright assassinated) outside an entrance to the New York Hilton Midtown in Manhattan, New York City on December 4, 2024. He was in the city to attend an annual investors meeting for UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare.

The fallout online was utterly appalling. Thompson's death received reactions of contempt and mockery from many Americans towards him, UnitedHealth Group, and, more broadly, the U.S. healthcare system. You had many more liberal members of the social media class praising the murderer as a hero and claiming this was just the start. The killing has been characterized as deserved or justified by some; these attitudes relate to anger over UnitedHealth's business practices and those of the United States health insurance industry at large – primarily their strategies to deny coverage to clients. In particular, Thompson's death was compared to the harm or death experienced by clients who were denied healthcare. Thompson's family became the subject of harassment and stalking after his death on various social media websites, and faced doxxing and violent threats. Shortly following the death, two of the houses owned by Thompson's family were swatted.¹ Remember, this is a married man from Ames, IA, father of two, killed for doing his job.

Headquartered in Minnetonka, MN, UnitedHealth Group² is one of the world's largest companies and the biggest healthcare insurance company in the United States. Here are some of its key dimensions:

• Revenue: In 2023, UnitedHealth Group reported $371.6 billion in revenue, a 14.6% increase year-over-year.

• Total assets: As of 2023, UnitedHealth Group's total assets were $273.7 billion.

• Number of employees: UnitedHealth Group has 175,604 employees.

• Number of people served: UnitedHealth Group serves more than 52 million people worldwide, with about 90% of those in the United States.

• Number of physicians: UnitedHealth Group is the largest employer of physicians in the United States, employing 10% of all doctors in the country.

• Number of prescriptions managed: UnitedHealth Group manages more than 22% of prescriptions filled in the United States

It’s a behomoth of a company. Those numbers above are larger than many nations around the world. It is a very large cog in the machinery that is the private health care system within the United States. And make no mistake, MILLIONS of people have health care issues treated regularly and covered due to UHG who pays those who care for their health care problems. It’s easy to lose sight that it does a lot of different things, many very good things, when it is just a large, faceless, behemoth of a company.

On Monday, December 9th, they captured his assailant, 26 year old Luigi Mangione, at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He was charged with murder, along with two counts of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon, one count of second-degree possession of a forged document and one count of third-degree criminal possession of a firearm. He was carrying a backpack containing a black 3D-printed pistol and a black 3D-printed silencer. A police official told CNN he also had a handwritten document stating, “these parasites had it coming,” and expressing “ill will toward corporate America.”

Mangione is not your run of the mill liberal/socialist anarchist. He grew up in a privileged Baltimore family, went to a wealthy exclusive private prep school where he graduated as valedictorian, went to Ivy League Penn for college, and was a member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. He spent time living in Hawaii and by all accounts was a relatively likeable and social person. He did however, have an issue with back pain and a condition that limited much of what he could do; at one point he had a surgery to alleviate the condition. It’s suggested by media reports that here is where his hatred of the health care industry, and corporate America, was sparked.

It’s easy to hate on business. The bigger the business, the easier it is to loathe it. When it becomes a large monolithic institution, as in many corporations, it’s easier to hate on it still. When the product being sold is abstract or incomprehensible, and not particularly easily understood such as, oh, I don’t know, health insurance, it’s even easier to hate on it. Worse yet for health insurance companies, they have to make very consequential decisions³, with huge personal ramifications for people, that if the result is a declination in coverage for the family, that hatred can very easily and quickly turn to anger or rage; there’s a reason there is a slew of television shows abotu doctors and none about insurers who pay them. Add all that up, and that’s a lot of built in animosity. UnitedHealthGroup was one of the biggest in that regard.

It’s still no excuse to commit an execution in broad daylight.

Still, many people hold those views on the left and the right. The bigger the institution, the more likely you’ll probably find some agreement between those viewpoints on their disgust towards big enterprise. And if you were to substitute “government” for “business” in that preceding paragraph, it almost reads like something Steve Bannon or some MAGA supporter would say. It’s exceptionally easy for one person to stand up and shout at the windmills on the faceless, walled up mechanics and machinery of a societal institution. But those wheels don’t really stop running, and they don’t change but for whether those particular wheels get bigger or smaller. This is but the point at which the far left and the far right look at each other and nod.⁴ It’s the classic case of a solitary figure standing up and shaking his fist at the much larger powers that be.

We’ve reached a point where the sheer scope and scale of some of our larger businesses and government just seem so huge and all-powerful to the point they encompass everything and are accountable for practically nothing. For many, this is deeply uncomfortable. It’s nothing new; Hobbes wrote about it at length in Leviathan way back in 1651. The question is whether we are going to organize policies that begin to limit and reign in their size or let them continue to grow unencumbered. It is an odd anomaly that to the extreme left and right, the answer seems to let them grow depending on which institution, government or business respectively, are considered.

However, as if to reiterate it again and state the obvious, there is no justification for killing a guy for just doing his job. Period.

PurpleAmerica’s Recommended Stories

I dithered on whether to include this bit but eventually decided in favor of it for a reason I’ll explain shortly.

An account under Luigi Mangione’s name on book review website Goodreads, gave Ted Kaczynski’s (a.k.a. “The Unabomber”) Manifesto a four-star review in January.

For those youngins who don’t know the Unabomber, he was a Harvard educated mathematics genius who cracked, REALLY hard, and decided to start sending bombs to computer science departments across the country. The FBI had a nationwide manhunt on him for years, until one day he said he would stop sending bombs if some major national papers agreed to post his “manifesto.” They reluctantly agreed.

I’ve read it. It’s the incredibly dense, intelligent, well thought out ravings of a troubled man who ha dserious issues with government, large business , higher education, and in particular technology. He clearly had troubles with the idea society was getting away from him, and technology is a main driver as to why. Many feel that way, overwhelmed with the speed at which technology is changing the world. Just look at any story talking about AI. But it’s never going to stop; you may as well be saying intelligence is useless and close down every school. Sure, ignorance may be bliss, but it doesn’t improve or save anyones lives, let people live longer in security or raise the standards of living to a point many disease and problems in the world are reduced or eliminated. What I’m saying is technology won’t stop because society doesn’t want it to stop; the overall benefits of it far outweigh the negative impacts.

The printing of the manifesto was the Unabomber’s downfall; his estranged brother recognized the language used and the ideas put forth in the document and notified the FBI. A few months later after putting the case together, they closed in and arrested Kaczynski who was living as a recluse in a small shack in the Montana woods. For a man who hated technology and society so much, he only felt at home in a place where neither of it existed.

Which is why I included writing about it. To many, I get it. The world seems so out of control and out of balance. So many external forces twisting one’s mind in various directions. What had seemed so pure and simple and innocent before is now perceived as just naivete at how the world really works. It’s a rude awakening many eventually have. But there are two ways to approch it. The radical way, which is the way Kaczynski, and Mangione and others such as the 1/6 Insurrectionists acted, and leads only to isolation, lunacy and infamy. Or there is the right sensible way, which is adapt, incorporate oneself into the world, absorb it and adjust. To reason. To be even-minded. And to look at the ills of both sides and say “That’s not us.” One can agree and reason with the ideas, but not to the extent radicals offer, nor the solutions put forth by violent and senseless actors.

That’s why we’re PurpleAmerica.

PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day

Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh were actually at the Federal Supermax Prison in Colorado at the same time and struck up a friendship. An interview with McVeigh had him commenting that their logic was a lot the same but their antagonists were different; Kaczynski’s was technology while McVeigh’s was the Federal Government.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

My heart goes out to Brian Thompson’s wife and two kids. May he rest in peace.

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. “Swatting” refers to the so called practical joke where someone calls in a false report to police of something serious or violent happened requiring the SWAT team to be dispatched. The result is serious damage to the property as the SWAT team breaches it; however, people have been known to be erroneously shot by police in these instances.

2. The United Healthcare Group headquarters now has temporary fencing put up outside of it in the aftermath of this event.

3. One of the more off putting aspects of many of the decisions health care companies have to make are the very impersonal aspects of actuarial death. Quite often the insurance has run out, they are no longer obligated to cover, and have to make the decision to end benefits with horrible results. Nobody likes to consider these consequences and almost universally blame the insurance company. It should be lost on no one as well that these decisions also are not made in a vacuum removed from financial decisions; it’s one of the reasons insurance companies retain many lawyers and have relationships with most large law firms.

4. Many political scientists refer to this as “horseshoe theory” where they replace the idea of a spectrum with a idea its actually a “horseshoe” shaped dichotomy. In my experience, it’s neither a linear spectrum or a horseshoe, which are oversimplifications of more complex ideas and bundles of issues. In fact, what this viewpoint has in common is an averse reaction to large entities. Such ideas are common in political circles but they have their distinct disadvantages. They’re economically inefficient, and have subject security concerns. But again, that’s very absract and try explaining it to people who prefer simpler solutions they can understand.