The Grand Illusion
In the case of Brian Thompson’s murder, there’s been a decidedly strong reaction on both sides, and that clouds the underlying issues that led to his death.
According to all reports, Thompson was a devoted and dedicated husband and family man, and a respected and well-liked colleague by those in the health insurance field. The healthcare industry is clearly stunned by the public reaction and how many people viewed his death with little or no sympathy.
But the fact is that Thompson was also a cold-eyed, analytical, profit-maximizing executive who clearly had no difficulty making decisions and implementing programs and systems that devastated thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of families in order to maintain or increase corporate profit margins. During his tenure as President of United Healthcare, Thompson raised profits from $10 billion to $16 billion, a sixty percent increase in three years. During that period, UnitedHealthcare was rated the worst of all U.S. healthcare firms in denying claims, turning down 32% of all claims, twice the industry average of 16%. For this, he was paid over $10 million last year.
What I find disturbing is the “mainstream” news media’s emphasis on Thompson the family man and nice guy persona, who was unjustly murdered. I’m not condoning the murder or the murderer, who appears to personify anti-establishment zealotry, and represents, on the other side, the same lack of humanity that Thompson represented professionally in his time with United Healthcare.
Just because Thompson was a loving devoted family man in his personal life and a good professional colleague doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a cold-blooded bastard in designing, implementing, and using methodologies designed to deny healthcare to people who had already paid for what they believed was adequate coverage.
At least one media newscaster made a comment along the lines that Thompson was just doing his job, but what was his job? Was it to effectively fund the healthcare of millions of Americans so that they could receive proper medical treatment, or was it principally to increase the profits of United Healthcare? That 32% rejection rate and 60% profit increase strongly suggest that the health of United Healthcare’s Medicare Advantage and other patients came in a distant second place to increased profits.
And the healthcare insurance industry is stunned by the reaction to his murder?
You’ve just pointed out the way most people view ‘white collar crime’ relative to more conventional crime. Unfortunately, the damages from white collar crime can be far reaching and just as damaging as violent crime. That said, investigating such crimes is often not a priority and not viewed by the public as important. Not until individual members of the public are the targets themselves. As well, the investigations and any court proceedings seem to take an agonizingly long time for and justice to result. Although tangential to this particular crime, look how long it’s taking to get justice for the victims of Rudy Guliani and Alex Jones. So, I very much agree with your sentiment argument here. I only wish our laws allowed for a more moral corporate governance in this country.
“Just following orders” is an old excuse for all dehumanizing activity since humans started to aggregate into groups for supposed supporting benefits.
Using barbarity to control barbarity is now an established political tool.
Yes: that is all negative: so, show me, anywhere in the world, where there is humanity not cowering in fear.
I think your comment is right on target. The current CEO of United Healthgroup made a statement last weekend, where he tried to justify the insurance company’s need to guard agaist unnecessary medical expenses.
That just proves he doesn’t understand the problem. He may be factually correct, and preventing waste is not a bad thing, but given the environment and the context of his comments, all he did was show a lack of compassion to those who have been hurt by the insurance industry and that he’s out of touch with the vast majority of his clients. As a small business employer who used United Healthcare, I want a better alternative for myself and my employees than this.
I think this is a larger issue than one of “just following orders”.
I saw a woman caught flat-footed by Piers Morgan the other day when she called Brian Thompson a criminal and Piers rejected that assertion by asking what crime he has been convicted of.
The woman got tongue-tied and couldn’t respond in a timely fashion but I personally believe she was alleging a moral crime rather than a legal one.
If a health insurance company denies a legitimate claim for life-saving treatment because it deems it too expensive and the claimant dies as a result of not receiving life-saving care it may be perfectly legal. Even if it turns out the company violated it’s contract it is more likely to be treated as civilly liable than criminally in courts of law.
In the eyes of the law and of the establishment a person is only a criminal if they are convicted of a crime in a court of law. Through those lens moral crimes are not taken into consideration only legal ones.
The problem isn’t just that Brian Thompson was simply following orders but also that nothing he did that lead to unneccessary deaths and heart-ache may even have been a legal crime.
We’ve gone from “all men are created equal” to corporations and billionaires can step on anyone they want while making themselves richer. From democracy to plutocracy.
I don’t know where it’s all going to end, but I’m certain it won’t be pretty.
I’ve been told (as I am not a lawyer nor do I live in the US) that the law in the USA literally *requires* companies to put the shareholders’value above all other considerations.
So the only way for a company to make moral choices that aren’t in the (short term, financial) best interests of the shareholders but prioritize the customers, community, environment, workers or even a sustainanable future for the company itself would require the company not to be publicly traded.
Maybe that law should be changed, to allow other factors to outweigh short-term shareholder value and make moral decisions possible.
I’m not saying this would really change companies’ and CEOs’ way of doing business, but it would allow companies that want to behave better to compete on that as a selling point.
Well that’s not entirely true. There’s not a ‘law’ as I understand it but rather a fiduciary duty (practice, expectation by the board and shareholders) to ‘ maximize profits’. But that’s clearly not what happens in most cases as many, many other considerations are made every day in running a large corporation. I worked for a fortune 100 company for over 30 years and they had a LOT of expenses that did not maximize profits to the shareholder. These included everything from maximizing their own personal salaries to having the entire workforce take a day off once a year for charity work. Further, a company also has to compete on price for their goods. So, they can’t raise prices or rates willy nilly. Finally they also have to persuade people to use their business/products and a poor reputation harms that.
I suppose many of these insurance companies have some captured market where there isn’t competition and in those cases it is morally reprehensible to stick it to their customers in such fashion as many do.
You make a good point about a “captured” market. There is only one Medicare Advantage plan where I live, at least if I read the Medicare handbook correctly.
Unfortunately, most companies define shareholder as the CEO and the board of directors. They also fail to take into consideration the long term value of the company and only look at the short term stock price.
The system is gamed. CEO compensation was changed from just salaries and perks to stock to try to align the CEO and the company. Now the CEO juices the stock to increase their compensation but don’t care what happens after they leave.
I could be wrong on the timing, but I believe it was up until the 1970s that health insurance companies were legally prevented from making a profit, which resulted in companies paying out claims fully, since they would get in trouble for NOT paying out all the excess money. I think this, or some form of this, would be a significantly better reform than any other one.
Most of these executives, board members, and upper management have never had to deal with the health insurance industry the way the rest if us have. Most of them have had access to quality, regular care from an early age – which is the single biggest indicator of avoiding serious medical problems through most of one’s life. Most of them are also on Cadillac plans where the premiums are still barely a fleabite out of their salaries, and they have no clue what words like “copay”, “coverage cap”, “coinsurance”, and “deductible” actually mean for the average person. Far as they’re concerned, the system works for *them*, so it must be working.
Being someone who grew up generic-velveta-and-store-brand-bologna poor, but now working entirely with silver spoon people, I am convinced that unless one has experienced the grotesque unfairness of the system, first-hand, it’s impossible to comprehend it, or the ordinary person’s reaction to it. They can try, but the experience is necessary to inform any knowledge or anecdota, information or reasoning.
When you have people who harm others and the law refuses to do anything about it, there is only one solution. Violence is the only solution when that happens.