The Real Villains

The CEO of health insurance giant UnitedHealthcare was gunned down by a masked assailant on Wednesday, much to the delight of Americans who’ve been suffering under their nation’s abusive healthcare system and the sociopathic profiteers who make their fortunes exploiting them through it.

UnitedHealthcare has an unusually high rate of claim denials, even compared to its fellow predatory health insurance companies, and as CEO of the company Brian Thompson was personally raking in $10.2 million a year.

The casings on the bullets used to murder Thompson reportedly had the words “deny”, “defend” and “depose” written on them, an apparent reference to the “delay, deny, defend” tactics notoriously used by health insurance companies to avoid payouts.

According to Thompson’s wife he had been receiving threats from people because of his company’s actions, telling NBC News that the threats were from people who were angry about “Basically, I don’t know, a lack of coverage?”

That’s an actual quote, by the way. The way she phrased it as a question says so much about how psychologically compartmentalized she had been from her husband’s predatory behavior. Like the wife of a mob boss who doesn’t think too hard about where all the money and gifts are coming from.

The conversations this story has sparked are very interesting. I’ve seen a lot of posts online highlighting the fact that the murder victim in this case was himself a murderer, and a much more prolific one than any serial killer or mass shooter who’s ever lived. The only difference was that his style of murder was protected by the law.

This really nails home the point that the legal system is not intended to protect ordinary citizens from the worst people in our society, it’s there to protect the very worst in our society from ordinary citizens. You can see this just by watching the frenetic police manhunt that’s underway for Brian Thompson’s killer while Thompson himself was walking around a free man, and an obscenely wealthy one at that, despite his having made his wealth via profits reaped from corporate policies designed to deprive sick and injured people of healthcare as frequently as possible.

None of the world’s worst people are in prison. Our society is fed a steady diet of movies and shows depicting heroic protagonists fighting villains who abuse and murder people in illegal ways, when in real life the actual villains of our society murder people in ways that are completely legal. None of their abuses are against the law.

Everyone’s talking about the murderous practices of US health insurance companies today, and rightly so, but we should also bring awareness to the fact that it isn’t just billionaire healthcare corporations who are killing and abusing people at mass scale for profit. Anyone who rakes in billions is building an empire on the blood, sweat and tears of ordinary people. At the very least they are leveraging unfair socioeconomic systems to extract labor from people around the world at extortionate rates, because everyone needs money and most people are born under the unfortunate circumstance of having nothing to sell but their labor. Workers are given the bare minimum slice of the corporate pie in order to maximize profits, in exactly the same way health insurance companies deny claims to maximize profits, keeping huge numbers of people toiling in crushing poverty. And poverty kills. These abuses are exponentially worse in the ways they are inflicted upon the populations of the global south.

That’s the bare minimum level of abusiveness you will find in these billionaire corporations — the most profitable ones are far more abusive. They actively work to create more and more war, ecocide, exploitation and inequality, because these things increase their profits. They lobby governments for more wars and militarism around the world because they manufacture weapons of war. They lobby governments to shrink environmental regulations because they maximize their corporate profits by pillaging the earth and externalizing the costs of industry onto the biosphere we all depend on. They lobby governments for fewer worker protections because worker protections eat into profits. They lobby governments for exploitative trade agreements because globalization gives them a steady supply of cheap wage slaves with fewer workers’ rights. They lobby governments to privatize services and resources so that they can turn things people are already getting into coercive mechanisms of private profit extraction.

These abuses are the product of the exploitative, profit-driven, competition-based systems under which we live. In a system where it’s profitable to sell health insurance and frequently deny insurance claims, you’re going to see psychopaths rise to obscene levels of wealth and power by profiteering off health insurance. In a system where war is profitable, you’re going to see psychopaths rise to obscene levels of wealth and power by profiteering off war. In a system where ecocide is profitable, you’re going to see psychopaths rise to obscene levels of wealth and power by profiteering off ecocide. In a system where exploitation is profitable, you’re going to see psychopaths rise to obscene levels of wealth and power by profiteering off exploitation.

Our laws and police forces exist first and foremost to protect these abusive systems. They’re not there to protect us, they’re there to protect our abusers. They’re there to make sure what happened to Brian Thompson happens as rarely as possible, and that people like him are able to abuse people like you and me with total impunity.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-real-villains