Smock Blogs

Are we really so divided, so used to dehumanizing one another, that people are out here openly celebrating the cold-blooded murder of a hardworking family man?

That’s The New Yorker and their take on the killing of Brian Thompson by a criminal mastermind whose one mistake was being seen at a McDonald’s because the NYPD, with a budget larger than the militaries of not a few countries, needed the assistance of someone who took a break from the abject misery of asking someone if they wanted fries with that for a non-living wage long enough to dime out a guy who thought Ted Kaczynski had some four star ideas.

It’s not often you see a single sentence that gets so much wrong. The writer must never check the comments or be on Facebook because if anything this has united (yup, that was intentional) in a way that we haven’t been since the pet rock. And when I picture "hardworking family man," I don’t see a guy who sold $15 million in stock in (alleged) insider trading. And I’m sure he worked hard for his $10 million salary.

Under former CEO Brian Thompson, UHC has been very successful. In 2021, UHC posted a $12 billion profit. That rose to $16 billion in 2023. Over about the same timeframe, denials for claims for post-acute care rose from 8.7 percent in 2019 to nearly 23 percent in 2022. And, according to one source, UHC denies 32 percent of claims, compared to an industry average of 16 percent.

That’s not to say he can’t earn millions as the CEO of a company, even though there’s a broader discussion about the wealth gap globally, and specifically in the United States. But he was the head of a company that profits when it provides less care. Sit with that for a minute: a company built around the concept of caring for others, increased profits by $4 billion dollars post-pandemic while doubling the rate of denials of the rest of the industry.

Murder is never the answer, and Brian Thompson didn’t deserve to be gunned down in cold blood. Still, categorizing someone like that, who every day made decisions that destroyed the lives of his fellow Americans, as a “hard working family man” works best if you remember that the plumber at Auschwitz had kids, too.