Celebrating Death Has a Long History in America. It’s Time to Focus Instead on Promoting Life.
Unfortunately, celebrating death has become all too common. But the feelings underneath the schadenfreude are deep and nonpartisan.
The killing of UnitedHealthCare CEO in New York City has set off an outpouring of emotions from the American public — some of them celebratory in nature.
Not a small number of people online are celebrating the death of CEO Brian Thompson, pointing to his role in leading a company that is synonymous with using every measure it can to deny its own consumers access to funding for health care.
I share the shock many feel with the thought of celebrating someone’s death. Even someone in an ethically suspect profession deserves not to be brutally murdered.
But imagine for a second it wasn’t Thompson who was killed in an early morning murder in Manhattan and instead Costco CEO Ron Vachris.
Costco is one of the most popular companies in the country. To consumers, the company is known for its aggressive pricing of products like its food court offerings — Costco’s founder Jim Sinegal once told then-CEO Craig Jelinek that he would kill him if he raised the price of the famed hot dog and soft drink combo — and for offering industry-leading wages and benefits for its employees.
The employee retention rate at the firm stands at 93%, while 92% of its members — you have to buy an annual membership to shop there — choose to renew.
Of course people wouldn’t be celebrating Vachris’s death or even be writing columns like this to explain why people were so outraged at him. Costco is a beloved institution. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few towns even dropped their American flags to half-mast to mourn his passing. (Costco does have its antagonists; the Teamsters are currently trying to organize it.)
The health insurance industry is an entirely different creature.
When I was working in Washington, D.C. at a think tank that was close to the Obama administration, I spent a lot of time exploring the health insurance jungle. It’s a nasty place full of some of America’s most Soviet-like commissars dedicated to figuring out ways to deny access to health care. There’s a reason America had to pass a law to require these companies to cover people who they didn’t want to enroll due to “pre-existing conditions” — a term that describes millions of people who had the bad luck of not having perfect health before they applied to be covered under health insurance.
Yes, polling shows that most Americans like their health insurance. Opponents of health care reforms are quick to point to these surveys, but they also don’t dig into them very deeply. One major survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation found both that most people like their insurance but that most insured adults say they have had problems in the past year using it — facing denials, authorization issues, and other problems that obstructed their access to health care.
Another way to think of those surveys of people giving their health insurance positive ratings is that they’re glad they have anything at all because a health crisis without it could mean bankruptcy or even death. A lot of people like their health insurance in the same sense that some minorities in Syria right now have made their peace with President Bashar Al-Assad; if there are mafia bosses controlling your life, you at least want their protection.
If you look around online, you’ll find that the vitriolic response to Thompson’s death was broad and nonpartisan. While many left-leaning commentators have weighed in with scorn, the top comments on the conservative subreddit are all scathing towards the health insurance industry:
“Insurance companies should not get the final say in what is medically necessary,” reads one top comment.
“People are naturally going to celebrate. This man's death is an allegory for the failure of privatized Healthcare as a whole,” reads another top comment with thousands of upvotes.
“Murder is wrong. But as a parent of a special needs child with UHC coverage who has been dealing with their bullshit for years…..I’m not sad about it in the least bit. Dude and his cohorts have plenty of blood on their hands,” reads another with a flair that reads “MAGA Latina.”
The anecdotal chatter we can all see online aligns well with how Americans say they feel about our health care system in broader surveys. A Gallup headline from this week reads: “View of U.S. Healthcare Quality Declines to 24-Year Low.”
Democrats and Republicans surveyed barely differ in their views on both cost and quality issues.
Taking joy in the gallows
To reiterate, none of this means that we should relish in Thompson’s death — or in the deaths of anyone. But I’m the odd duck who follows this principle universally.
Talk to anyone long enough and you’ll probably find some area where they, too, would take pleasure in someone’s death, provided they think that person is bad enough. That ranges from liberals who wished that Trump’s assassin hadn’t missed to people with strong feelings about the conflicts in Eastern Ukraine or the Middle East who are delighted by seeing the opposing side’s people perish to conservatives who take pleasure in seeing the executions of convicted violent criminals.
Celebrating the deaths of people we perceive as the Bad Guys is as old as humanity itself. People the world around would line up to watch public executions; sometimes they’d even make a real day out of it.
America’s last state-sanctioned public execution took place in 1936 in Owensboro, Kentucky. Around 20,000 people attended. It was a spectacle not only in that a black man was being executed for the crime of the rape of a white woman but that his executioner would be a white woman herself: Sherriff Florence Thompson. (Thompson ultimately decided to allow a male executioner to do the deed.)
The crowds were feted for hours by vendors selling popcorn, hotdogs, and drinks. It was a carnival-like atmosphere in Owensboro, more reminiscent of Mardi Gras than the death of a man. “Every bar was packed to the doors. Down the main street tipsy merrymakers rollicked all night. 'Hanging parties' were held in many a home,” TIME Magazine reported at the time.
But as news spread of the event all around the country, Kentucky lawmakers grew embarrassed over all the revelry they had encouraged. Less than two years later, Kentucky outlawed public executions.
Winning a more humane country
No number of executions will heal the sicknesses in our health care system or in the schadenfreude that people feel after such brutal killings; the problem isn’t that we have an excess of Bad Guys running the show but the bad system they’re part of.
The legal and financial arrangements that have evolved in this country encourage various actors — from the health insurance companies, to hospitals, to doctors, to Big Pharma, to Pharmacy Benefit Managers — to battle each other for the opportunity to make money where the ordinary person just trying to afford insulin for their child or a pacemaker for themselves is left out of the picture altogether.
Our politicians are petrified of the power of various health industry actors, and the price of their cowardice is thousands of people going bankrupt from health care bills every year and many others suffering in pain or even losing their lives from lack of access to care.
The way out of this moral morass is not through violence but through democratic action — deliberation, protest, elections, and legislation. Our health care system is so horrible that many Americans, across the political spectrum, respond to a murder with nothing but resentment and angst. Some are even cheering on the killer. We shouldn’t be surprised that an uncivilized system can turn people uncivilized.
Yup. I used to work for what is now Lockheed-Martin (my first job out of college during the depths of the Cold War), and would prefer that antiwar types not kill me or even its CEO. I also used to work for a few other companies that have significant groups of people that don't like them, particularly Google, which bought Fitbit when I was there (otherwise, I avoided Google as I don't like advertising-based revenue models, even though Google HQ is only a long walk or short bike-ride from my house).
The shooting of the United Health CEO is not just murder, but terrorism, as it's politically motivated murder intended to make a political statement. Whether one agrees with the political statement or not is irrelevant to it being a crime, and a very bad precedent.
“The way out of this moral morass is not through violence but through democratic action — deliberation, protest, elections, and legislation.” This is so true but the reason some people are giddy about this murder is that the Healthcare industry has funneled its parasitic profits into buying politicians of both parties. If peaceful democratic measures are off the table because of an ethically compromised political class it only raises the chance of vigilante violence against the elites they are trying to protect.