'Rage and glee' after health insurance CEO's killing a stark warning for US: columnist

The shocking killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a hotel in New York City triggered an avalanche of "rage and glee" on the internet as people frustrated with their health insurers dance on his grave — and it says something dark about the state of American society, wrote Zeynep Tufekci for The New York Times.

The gunman behind the crime, who is still being hunted by the NYPD, "was compared to John Q, the desperate fictional father who takes an entire emergency room hostage after a health insurance company refuses to cover his son’s lifesaving transplant in a 2002 film of the same name," wrote Tufekci. "Some posted 'prior authorization needed before thoughts and prayers.' Others wryly pointed out that the reward for information connected to the murder, $10,000, was less than their annual deductibles. One observer recommended that Thompson be scheduled to see a specialist in a few months, maybe."

Even more disturbingly, she wrote, some people urged anyone with information not to help police find the killer or attacked those who were trying to help.

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This level of anger spilling over in society has not been seen before, she wrote.

"The rage that people felt at the health insurance industry, and the elation that they expressed at seeing it injured, was widespread and organic. It was shocking to many, but it crossed communities all along the political spectrum and took hold in countless divergent cultural clusters."

People reacted with laughing emojis to UnitedHealthcare's mourning Facebook posts, while politicians who offered condolences "were eviscerated," often by people posting their stories of being denied health care.

The United States has been down this road before, Tufekci wrote, during the "Gilded Age," the era of the late 19th century that saw the rise of modern American industry, and with it a group of business tycoons who became unfathomably wealthy and powerful, creating a massive gulf between the rich and poor.

"Less well remembered is the intensity of political violence that erupted," she wrote. "The vast inequities of the era fueled political movements that targeted corporate titans, politicians, judges and others for violence. In 1892, an anarchist tried to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick after a drawn-out conflict between Pinkerton security guards and workers. In 1901, an anarchist sympathizer assassinated President William McKinley. And so on."

Ultimately, a series of new social safety nets and rights for workers calmed down the unrest. But it's a stark warning of the kind of violence we may be on the brink of with mass outpourings of glee over murder of a health insurance CEO, she concluded.

"We still don’t know who killed Brian Thompson or what his motive was," she wrote — but "whatever facts eventually emerge, the anger it has laid bare will still be real, and what we glimpsed should ring all the alarm bells."