When Bad Things Happen To Bad People

Don’t expect sympathy for people who exhibit none of it themselves.

I’ve done a lot of beating up on leftists of late - and there will surely be more of that to come. To balance things out a little, I’m going to be defending them today, and taking aim at folks I usually count as members of my very own tribe: reasonable liberals.

The shocking, caught-on-camera murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was met with fear and disgust on the right, giddy celebration on the left, and too much hand-wringing from the everybody-chill-out crowd (which usually includes this writer). Thompson was leaving a New York City hotel when his killer, who’d been lying in wait, drew a sound-suppressed pistol and shot him in the back before fleeing on an e-bike.

I’ll stop short of sharing the memes, but they sort of wrote themselves in this case. A lot of stuff about coverage being denied and how “CEO” is a preexisting condition.

Ah, ya know what? Fuck it. I will share them. Here. Have a laugh. And don’t feel bad about it either. Because if you were hurt, or sick, or in trouble, Brian Thompson and the people who worked for him wouldn’t feel the least bit bad about sticking it to you. They’d earn off it.

Here’s all the disclaimer I can muster on this one:

Murder is bad. People shouldn’t do it. People are more than the sum of their worst parts. Everyone is somebody’s loved one. Hitler’s dog probably thought he was terrific.

But look, the reason some are cheering this is because Brian Thompson chose to dedicate his professional life to climbing the ladder of an evil, parasitic company that makes its money by preying on its customers at their weakest and most vulnerable. Insurers aren’t required to disclose their denial rates, and they don’t voluntarily do it (gawrsh, I wonder why…), but UnitedHealthcare has one of the worst consumer ratings for an insurer of any stripe. They are famous for auto-denying claims and dragging their heels in the hopes that their customers will simply die before costing them anything.

Tell me. Please. How is it unreasonable - how does it make one a Bad Person - to feel a little schadenfreude at the leader of this cartel biting the dust?

God, Dave, you’re such a commie.

Au contraire, mon ami. I love capitalism.

But you know who else are capitalists? Drug dealers. Armed robbers. Don’t forget sex traffickers! Does thinking that they too are net negatives make me a pinko?

Why, just as I was writing this, I hopped over to X to try to screenshot some reactions and came upon a video of a New Orleans store clerk blowing away two guys who were sticking him up.

Every single reaction was along the lines of, “lol,” “FAFO,” “play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” “got what was coming to them.” Every one.

So good. We understand that when bad things happen to bad people, it’s a fairly natural reaction to not be sad about it. To not contort oneself overmuch in expressing sympathy for somebody who wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. Somebody who would charge you before refusing to piss on you when you were on fire.

Know what else popped up in my feed while I was outlining this piece? One of my mutuals - a seriously nice lady, who’s battling a seriously scary cancer - posted about a recent doctor visit at which she was told that her unbearable pain could not be managed. Not because the drugs to do so don’t exist, but because the insurer to whom she forks over a hefty chunk of her paycheck doesn’t feel that her business entitles her to relief from unbearable pain. Three guesses as to where she bought her policy…

Blue Cross Blue Shield, in a move so cartoonishly evil, I checked several, independent sources before even believing it, just announced that they will be limiting their coverage of anesthesia. Anesthesia.

Surgery went on too long? Pay up, loser. Or, I dunno, wake up? Find a bullet to bite?

UPDATE: Just since starting this piece, Anthem/BCBS have reversed their decision. Can’t imagine what motivated this newfound charity…

The for-profit health insurance industry should not exist. It serves no useful purpose. It doesn’t control costs, doesn’t expand access to care, and doesn’t offer any services that couldn’t simply be performed by providers and paid for with taxes. Profiting from selling health insurance should be as illegal as selling heroin or pimping.

Maybe more so, since heroin and hookers at least offer users relief. You can generally expect to get what you pay for when you buy a bag of smack or hire an escort.

But health insurers are directly incentivized to cause you misery. They make their money by not giving you the thing you paid for. And by constantly increasing the amount you pay for the privilege of them holding out on you.

Imagine an ice cream shop that refused ice cream to every third person who paid for it. Actually, that’s a bad example. Nobody needs to buy ice cream. It’d be more like if every store or business you ever went to required you to pay a valet to park your car. But the valets put 35% of all cars into a crusher, sell the scrap, then tell you to go fuck yourself.

Don’t want to pay a valet? Never drive. Don’t want to pay a health insurer? Never get sick or hurt. Easy peasy.

Brian Thompson might have been a perfectly nice man. I’m sure his kids loved him, that his friends will miss him, and that his last moments on earth were characterized by a pain and horror I wouldn’t wish on anyone. For that, he and his have my sympathy.

But last year, New York state saw an average of about 1.5 murders per day. How many of them did you hear about? How many received wall-to-wall media coverage? Not many. This one did, not because it was especially sad, or gruesome, or because the victim was especially well-known, but because the victim was from a caste that isn’t usually represented in homicide stats.

The media outlets and “reasonable” centrists shaming you for not performing enough grief right now are totally, 100%, a-ok with murder. It’s background noise. Not a subject that bothers them, or that they even notice under regular circumstances. But in this case, somebody got killed who Wasn’t Supposed To. Somebody who looks - yikes! - uncomfortably like them. And that you’re not disappointed about it scares them. It makes them worry that the peasants may not always just point their pitchforks at each other.

When somebody is killed, the crime ends up with a high profile, and the [suspected] motive is this painfully relatable, people are going to…relate to it. That doesn’t make them ghouls, it makes them human. If you’re going to publicize or comment on an incident like this, don’t expect members of your audience to start wailing and rending their garments. Some of them are undoubtedly victims of the victim. Save your tut-tutting for somebody who gives a shit.

I don’t remember a lot of finger wagging at the folks who were joking after Jeffrey Epstein got whacked definitely committed suicide all by himself. No one was admonished to grieve Dahmer when he got shanked, or Bin Laden when the SEALs served him a dose of his own medicine.

And if it sounds like I just compared an insurance CEO, suspected of no crimes at all of which I am aware, to a sex pervert, a serial killer, and a terrorist, it’s because that is definitely and intentionally what I just did. Sorry, not sorry.

If you’ve been there, you know. If you or a loved one has ever had a serious health issue, and ever known a time when you desperately depended on somebody like Brian Thompson to provide you with [this cannot be overstressed] the fucking thing you already fucking paid for, then you know why people aren’t stopping to observe the nicety of, “murder is bad, but…” before they sound off on this.

And if you haven’t - if no one you care about has ever had to endure pain or suffering or bankruptcy or death because of the callousness of somebody like Thompson - then count yourself lucky.

If your luck changes, you might understand. And you might learn that, in fact, you haven’t been hating these people enough.