Headline Roundup • December 9th, 2024
Online Reactions to the Killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO
Summary from the AllSides News Team
Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was killed last week in New York City. Many see his murder as horrific, but some commenters online celebrated, arguing that the dysfunctional healthcare system in the U.S. has killed many.
Is the Celebration Partisan?: Ben Shapiro (Right bias) accused the left of cheering on murder. Several commenters on Shapiro's video point out that they have seen some on the right celebrating as well, or that they, on the right themselves, do not have sympathy for Thompson due to their experience with the healthcare system. A writer in UnHerd (Center bias) argued that the reactions to Thompson's death exposed a class divide rather than a partisan one.
Understanding the Reactions: Writers for Vox (Left bias) said, "There’s more going on here than just knee-jerk trolling," adding, "Rather than blaming one another for not responding to news of the shooting in the 'right' way, perhaps we should recognize that deficit as a yearning for a society that shows more compassion by default to its most vulnerable members...the system [Thompson] was a key part of frequently operated with little compassion for the humans at the other end of his decisions, and the responses that default to jokes about being 'out of network' underscore that." Others, like Rich Lowry (Right bias), argued that we should not normalize assassination as a tool for social change.
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Mike Segar/Reuters
Assassination is evidently now an acceptable tool of social change.
Apparently, we don’t live in quite the country we thought we did.
As of early last week, we assumed we were a society where business decisions by insurance companies might be wrongheaded or unpopular but could be made without fear of violence.
Alex Kent/Getty Images
A man was killed. That’s the kind of thing people normally get upset about. But not this week. This week, when UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead in Manhattan, the internet erupted in cheers.
Many people, including many progressives and liberals, said they would refuse to mourn the UnitedHealthcare executive because of the habitual unfairness of health insurance providers like the one Thompson oversaw.
The backlash against Thompson spread across social media, from TikTok to Twitter, LinkedIn to Bluesky — typically acerbic jokes about the poster’s empathy being out of network or that Thompson’s claim to sympathy had...
Getty
On Wednesday morning Brian Thompson, the 50-year old CEO of insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed by a masked assassin wielding a silenced handgun as he left his Manhattan hotel to attend the company’s annual shareholder conference. The bullet casings were later revealed to contain the words “delay”, “deny”, and “defend”, which also happened to form the title of a book exposing common malpractice within the insurance industry.
UnitedHealthcare is America’s largest insurer, raking in $372 billion in profits last year and holding 2,200 subsidiaries, through which an estimated 5% of US gross domestic product passes...
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