Brian Thompson’s execution and its moral implications

Brian Thompson was a capitalist’s capitalist. He was a poster boy for greed in our time, a man driven by the ethos of capital accumulation at any price and at all cost — up to and including human life.

The health insurance corporation of which he was CEO — UnitedHealthcare — has the onerous record of denying a third of all claims from its policyholders; and often times on the most spurious of grounds. The result is thousands of people being condemned to an early death year after year across the land of the free.

For someone such as me, who spent seven years in the US — and who currently resides in Scotland — the lack of a healthcare system as a right of citizenship rather than a privilege of wealth is inordinately barbaric. The profit motive in medicine is death itself, which is how the execution of Brian Thompson must be understood.

In his time as CEO of UnitedHealthcare, since 2021, this man amassed a personal fortune whilst being personally responsible for the deaths of more Americans than every mass shooter in America during the same period. The difference is that Thompson’s ability to commit murder was done under the cloak of legality, which meant that instead of being sent to prison, Thompson was feted at shareholder and investor conferences at plush hotels in places such as New York’s Manhattan.