Brian Thompson was unlucky - any private health insurance boss could have been hit

Brian Thompson was unlucky – any private health insurance boss could have been hit

We’ve had a while to ponder the implications of the UnitedHealth murder and it seems clear that Brian Thompson was unlucky – any private health insurance boss could have been hit.

We have known that health insurers have been cheating their customers for decades. Do you remember the fuss when Unum was hired to advise the Department for Work and Pensions on how to cheat claimants out of sickness and disability benefits? It was because the firm had been convicted of cheating its customers in the United States.

And it seems clear that Mr Thompson’s murderer had the tactics of the hugely-profitable insurance firm on their mind when they committed the crime; shell casings found at the scene had the words “deny”, “depose” and “defend” scrawled in permanent marker on them.

They are believed to refer to the ways health insurers try to avoid paying their customers’ medical bills.

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The rich and powerful, and their media friends, have been quick to blame the killing on a rising tide of violence that they say is now seen as a legitimate way of handling civil disputes – and to affect shock at the groundswell of tacit approval shown by the number of people on the social media sharing stories of how health insurers have shafted them.

Let’s bear in mind that healthcare bills bankrupted around 600,000 US citizens last year. You can be sure that some of them had expected their health insurance policy to foot the bill before the insurance firm’s lawyers stepped in to explain how this line or that omission meant their client was not liable.

It’s a racket – or so it seems to This Writer. Healthcare costs a fortune so patients are forced to take out insurance against the cost of the bills – but the insurance firm has written its contract in such a way that it cannot be made to pay. The patient is left to face an enormous bill, and the knowledge that they have paid another small fortune for insurance that is worthless to them – but worth a fortune to the company’s bosses and shareholders.

Perhaps those people feel justified in what they were doing. After all, in olden times the rich and the powerful could do whatever they liked to the proles and the plebs and nobody (worth mentioning) cared – why not them?

Now they have their answer: because it is potentially fatal. Maybe it is true that the rich and powerful are moving back into positions where they think they can do what they like once again – but the rest of us have had a fairly long period of comparative privilege and we see no reason the men and women in suits should consider themselves to be better than us.

So if they decide to rip us off, some of us may now decide to bump them off in retaliation.

No, it isn’t legal, and I’m sure Mr Thompson’s killer will pay the highest price American justice can confer – but then, fraudulent insurance policies that do not protect people properly from the high cost of care should not be legal either.

You can sympathise with the strength of feeling that led to this, if not (one hopes) with the action it has provoked.

And the Tories (not to mention politicians in other parties, including Labour) want to introduce the same system here. One wonders whether they have already stocked up on bullet-proof jackets.


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