Delay Deny Depose

Why the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO matters and why we must question everything.

Listen to the voiceover to read along with me!

So, if you don’t follow any type of news source, or don’t have social media, you might not know that on Wednesday, Dec 4th at 6:40 am a gunman shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson. As of December 6th, the gunman has not been found.

The rumor mill says that because Thompson was under investigation by the Department of Justice the gunman could have been hired by UnitedHealthcare themselves…others are saying the assassin is a professional, noting his efficiency and skill saying he can’t be any regular “joe-schmoe from Indiana”… we may never know who the killer is… but what is evident and what we do know is that his actions have resonated with people and many hope that he is never found.

The NYPD is investigating —doing what they do best, protecting the rich and powerful— and in their investigation they have yet to distinguish a motive for this killing. Many of us who live down on “working class” earth, might attempt to surmise a possible motive: the gunman could have been one of the millions affected by UnitedHealth Group’s (UHG) greedy schemes of enticing “doctors through bonuses and performance reviews to make patients seem as sick as possible”. Or he could have been one of the many whose coverage was delayed and denied by UHG resulting “in ongoing sickness, injury, medical debt, bankruptcy, worsened health outcomes and [or] even premature death”.¹ Or he could have just wanted to kill some random dude at 6 am on a Wednesday —but considering the bullet casings were etched with the words “delay”, “deny”, and “depose”, I don’t think the latter applies.

The etched words refer to “‘delay, deny, defend’—describing allegations leveled at insurers who avoid paying claims [to cover the cost of patient care]...The phrase, adopted by critics of the healthcare industry, refers to the ways insurance companies ‘delay paying claims, deny valid claims in whole or part, and defend their actions by forcing claimants to enter litigation’”.² The assassin’s revision of the phrase, changing “defend” to “depose”, speaks to a fervent nascent energy —energy that, when acted upon with gusto, can be used to bring revolutionary change, topple the oligarchs, and expose the constrictive interest of the ruling class/ the elite/ the 1%/ the regime/et al; interests that are in direct opposition to basic human rights and decent morality. This toppling by no means has to be conducted through violence, however, it’s historically proven that the United States knows no other language but violence, and it seems like the people are beginning to adopt this language.

Recently I watched Ridley Scott's Napoleon (2023), the film starts in the middle of the “Reign of Terror” admist the Great French Revolution (the French had many smaller revolutions). We are thrust into the film with the beheading of Queen Marie Antoinette by guillotine in a public square in 1793.

this is an image from the movie Napoleon, not an image from the actual event because it happened before cameras were invented.

For those who did not excel in history class like I did (not to brag...), you may not know that the 1789 French Revolution is considered the pivotal shift in modern history and modern democracy. It delineates the shift to modernism, not just in the West, but globally as well. “The Revolution was indeed momentous, for it overthrew the Old Regime and set or reaffirmed France (and eventually other parts of Europe) on a secular, culturally democratic, politically republican³ and liberal economic course.”⁴ The movers of the revolution defined the themes of society thereafter— those movers were the working class, who were discontented (to say the least) with the extreme wealth gap between them and the elite. In the years leading up to the revolution this chasm was exacerbated, the revolution culminated in a communal celebration of guillotining with joyful roars as rich heads rolled. Years, after heads rolled right into the chasm, came a constitutional republic and model-worthy revolutionary tactics for contemporary movements.

The same type of communal celebration is happening after Thompsons’ reckoning.

This momentum could manifest into something great, possibly as great as the Great French Revolution. For the first time in a while, the oligarchs are scared. The New York Times reports that the assassination has “business leaders on edge”.

Rightfully so.

According to Forbes, UnitedHealthcare (UHC) has over 50 million medical plan customers. Why is it that Thompson can be responsible for the death of insurers covered by UHC and never receive any type of penalty, financial or otherwise? In fact, the UnitedHealth Group made 6 billion in 3 third-quarter earnings alone, and Thompson took home 10.2 million dollars last year. Why is it that an insurance company has more power than your doctor in deciding what care you can receive? Is it right that “[m]any corporate insurers profit directly from practices and tactics that hurt patients and the hospital care they rely on”?⁵

Why can UHG and other insurance groups use their “historic profits to lobby for legislation that would cause substantial harm to patients and providers”?⁶ UHG has spent over $ 100 million on lobbying since 1998. Unless they want to nationalize healthcare in America, our government leaders have an obligation to hold corporate insurers accountable when their practices harm patients and make care less accessible. But why even bother looking to your elected officials to help, UHG pays more bipartisan House and Senate representatives than I could count. The Biden Administration had finalized a plan to put guardrails on the extensive misuse of prior authorizations —a policy that requires doctors to get insurance permission before providing care— but doctors say the Biden plan “only scratches the surface”.⁷

James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936) was a professor of European history at Columbia University and wrote the textbook Medieval and Modern Times, a standard for early Western Civ courses. Robinson writes about what I think should echo among the takeaways of the French Rev and the achievements it reached:

When one meets the words 'French Revolution,' he is pretty sure to call up before his mind's eye the guillotine and its hundreds of victims, and the Paris mob shouting the hymn of the Marseillaise as they paraded the streets with the heads of unfortunate aristocrats' on their pikes. Every one has heard of this terrible episode in French history even if he knows practically nothing of the permanent good which was accomplished at the time. Indeed, it has made so deep an impression on posterity that the Reign of Terror is often mistaken for the real Revolution. It was, however, only a sequel to it, an unhappy accident which will seem less and less important as the years go on, while the achievements of the Revolution itself will loom larger and larger.⁸

The significant takeaway from the Great Revolution is not the violence during the Reign of Terror —for that is just a crimson brush stroke of a larger painting— what should loom larger than the violence is the collective cognition, action, revolutionary opposition, and mass radicalization. What should echo is the duality of a revolution as both a process and an event.

So what could come of this gunman’s actions and the popular response?

I think we need to continue to question the multitude of ways in which the regime has an inculpable life-or-death grip on our being. I think we need to use this momentum and put the pedal to the metal on both collective and individual action. The communal energy in celebration of this assassin can be used to foster fertile ideas of class consciousness and illegitimacy in the regime. As Fathali M. Moghaddam says in his book The Psychology of Revolution, “the puzzle of revolution is best explained through a psychological lens.”⁹ While the goal of a revolution is mass change, revolutionaries have the burdensome task of changing “behavior among both the masses and the elite; they must transform how people think and act.”¹⁰

The corporate elites have it easy, the behavior and psyche of the American working class are already conditioned in their favor. Most of the time when working-class people ask “Why am I so poor while the elite are so rich?”, they’ll cycle through the multitude of answers but ultimately come to the answer that so many of us have been programmed to believe: “you don’t work hard enough”. And while you go on believing that “you don’t work hard enough”, CEOs like Thompson make more money than you will ever see in your lifetime while they profit off your suffering and do as little work as possible. The “work harder” rhetoric and its sidekick “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, are derisively offensive, so much so it makes me want to spit; there will never be a way to “work hard” enough to make the federal minimum wage (or any state minimum wage for that matter) at $7.25/hr cover the exorbitant cost of contemporary living.

But in the case of Thompson’s assassination, UHG cannot pass the blame onto the patients for not “working hard enough” —as if that rhetoric could even apply here—only UHG is to blame for denying and delaying coverage to thousands of insurers.

In the wake of the assassin’s actions, I think what we’re seeing is a rift in cognitive change. Now more than ever “regular” people who do not necessarily identify as “revolutionaries” are becoming enlightened to the unjust, immoral, and greedy actions of the elite and want to see them held accountable.

While the NYPD still fumbles around trying to decipher the motive of the assassin, it is clear that he is one of the many that have been “trampled on by the ruling regime”¹¹, and as Moghaddam puts it, we must give “priority” to those who have been trampled. Regime sympathizers are up in arms with the “depravity” of those celebrating Thompson’s murder but do not raise arms at the lives lost at the hands of Thompson's and UHG’s greed. Sympathizers who demand compassion for Thompson’s widow and condemn violence against civilians tend to be the same who encourage Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza as it destroys hundreds of thousands of families and kills civilians indiscriminately.

Social media, (specifically Twitter) is calling the assassin the people’s princess, and while he may be tall, white, and ready to expose the oligarchies similar to Princess Diana the ‘people’s princess’, fun nicknames and memes will not take us far enough. What we can do with this energy is use it as a stepping stone to collective mobilization. “What changes step to step is the psychological experiences of people moving along this path, including their perception of and willingness to take risks together with their estimations of the likelihood of achieving regime change.”¹²

The assassin may be working alone but

we should not limit our attention to individuals moving independently along the sequence of steps because in the lead-up to revolution group-level processes are far more powerful and consequential than individual-level processes... For example, it is through social interactions and shared narratives in communities that individuals arrive at basic beliefs about how fairly they are being treated in society; how just, legitimate, and stable the ruling regime is; and what possibilities are available for change toward a better society. Beliefs in these domains are collaboratively constructed and collectively upheld, particularly through shared narratives as part of daily social life. Beliefs do not just develop in isolation within independent individuals.¹³

If I were to be of any help to the NYPD in deciphering the motive behind our gladiator’s actions (I’m in a Ridley Scott phase), I might suggest his motive was justice. Pure and simple. The role of a revolutionary is multi-faceted, one role in particular is to move people, inspire, and reach people on an emotional level and I think the assassin has done just that (especially now that we have a few images that show his face....I am moved on an emotional level… cuz he’s kinda cute....). Institutionalized violence, the type that Thompson and UHG are a part of, harms more individuals than any popular mass violence inflicted under a “reign of terror”. Popular mass violence does not have to define the revolution, but if the elite are not willing to participate in revolutionary change, then so be it.

1. www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/07/30/unitedhealth-group-investigation

2. www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2024/12/05/deny-defend-depose-what-to-know-about-words-reportedly-on-shell-casings-tied-to-unitedhealthcare-ceo-shooting/

3. not as in “democrat” and “republican” in the American political party way. But in the true definition of the words of “democracy” and “republic”

4. Harison, Casey. “Teaching the French Revolution: Lessons and Imagery from Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Textbooks.” The History Teacher 35, no. 2 (2002): 137–62. https://doi.org/10.2307/3054175.

5. https://strengthenhealthcare.org/corporate-insurers-continue-to-prioritize-profits-over-patients/

6. https://strengthenhealthcare.org/corporate-insurers-continue-to-prioritize-profits-over-patients/

7. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/opinion/health-insurance-prior-authorization.html

8. Robinson, Medieval and Modern Times (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1919), 473.

9. Moghaddam, Fathali M. The Psychology of Revolution. Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Page 1

10. Moghaddam Page 3

11. Moghaddam Page 75

12. Moghaddam Page 85

13. Moghaddam Page 85