Social contract and the meaning of murder

The murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealth earlier this week has prompted not just a widescale manhunt for the killer, but some pretty spicy commentary online.

The personal stories of health care denial, increasing awareness that UnitedHealth knowingly deployed an algorithm that denied claims “aggressively” and had a 90% error rate, and the jokey memes about “my compassion was out of network and was denied” bring us to one of the most defining questions of the US’s capitalist-medical hellscape: what does it mean to murder?

Systems can’t murder you. Isn’t that convenient…for them.

Legally, murder is defined as “the unlawful killing of a human being with malice.” We know this covers the death of Brian Thompson: he was murdered with obvious malice. But as a CEO of a company which was founded to and knowingly did contribute to pain, suffering, and death, what does the legal definition of murder say about his actions?  

Laws are part of our social contract. And legally, murder means a killing must be unlawful. So if your laws that say that allowing someone to die because you denied their lifesaving treatment is not murder, then you can kill millions and it’s not murder. Likewise, murder requires “malice” not just greed. The rage online shows that these technocratic details are starting to fray as our social contract continues to be shredded from the top down.

Re cap: you put on a ski mask and shoot someone because you’ve got beef: murder. You put on a suit and sit behind a desk and sign death warrants for thousands of people just so you can make a few bucks: good business.

If the absolute rage that has been unleased towards health insurance companies in the wake of Thompson’s murder tells us one thing, it is that people are figuring this out, and they’re tired of it.  People in power write laws to protect systems and institutions from accountability, which is why if I poison a town’s water supply I go to jail; if a company does it, their leaders get bonuses. There’s always leeway for a little inequality and a little social stratification, but as the rule of law unwinds starting with the highest levels of power, things risk getting really dangerous.

To put it as Steinbeck would:

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success… and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Speaking Ill of the Dead

I’ve seen a lot of memes with the lowkey savage Clarence Darrow quote, “I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary notices I have read with pleasure.”  (He also deeply hated rich people, especially when they were profiting off of poor people, and once referred to banking and the Rockefellers specifically, as having “a great deal better hold-up game” than career criminals.)

I think you all know my policy on speaking ill of the dead—going back to the social contract, the particular social constraint of not speaking ill of the dead applies only to people who it in their lives did not consistently and massively harm the living. Or as Gollum would say, “we be nice to them if they be nice to us.”

So I’m with Darrow on this one. Sure, it’s not considered polite to make jokes about someone’s murder, but since it is considered polite to deny kids’ cancer treatments and then go on vacation, I’m not overly concerned with politeness these days.

Brian Thompson’s entire job was rooted in an industry detrimental to American health and well-being. And he wasn’t just some pencil-pusher who needed to put food on the table, he was a leader in that field. Universal health care would have saved 330,000 lives during COVID alone. A 2020 study suggest, it would have saved almost $500 billion dollars. Given medical debt’s relationship to homelessness, suicide, and death, and that the industry overrides even medical doctors’ wishes, I say social rules don’t apply.

There’s probably a reason the police haven’t announced that they’re looking at all recent instances of UnitedHealth denying insurance claims which resulted in the death of children or spouses. They don’t want to publicly point out that this industry actually kills people and the industry doesn’t want those numbers to be released to the public.

Current levels of inequality are a national security—and existential—threat

It has been clear for some time that the rising inequality in this country is unsustainable. Throughout history, it has always been the case that extreme levels of inequality breeds violent retribution, including in the US.

Most of us would rather sort out these kinds of inequalities legally, but as long as the law protects for-profit mass murders whether those are health insurance CEOs who offer nothing to the system but cost, polluters who destroy water supplies and the actual planet itself, or politicians and corporations who grift off of public dollars while destroying social safety nets, things are going to keep getting out of hand.