Why Americans Appear to Love the UnitedHealthcare Assassin

On X, Luigi Mangione’s been dubbed the Claims Adjuster, or simply the Adjuster. The memes suggest a Punisher-style comic-book hero, hooded and masked, in a black jacket, with a silenced pistol. The narrative is about justice against the corporate elite and redemption and regeneration through violence. In this narrative, the villain is a sociopath deserving of death, the proof of evil his tenure since 2021 as executive of a predatory health insurance company whose corporate parent, UnitedHealth Group, has assets valued at $284 billion and is known to profit from denying care to its customers.

The basics of the event are by now well-known. On December 4, in the dawn twilight on 54^th Street in midtown Manhattan, the Adjuster walked up behind the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, and shot him in the back with a silenced pistol at the entrance to the Hilton Hotel, where the executive was scheduled to present an earnings report at the annual investor conference. Thompson, wearing a blue suit, spun around, facing his assailant before collapsing to the sidewalk. The shooter fired two more times, perhaps for a coup-de-grace à la tête, manually sliding the action on the pistol.

From what we know, Thompson died instantly. The Adjuster walked away as if he’d bought a bagel, breaking into a slow jog as he crossed 54^th, after which he escaped across Central Park on a bicycle – in what looks, from video footage, a leisurely pace — and made his way out of the city via taxi cab and a commuter bus.

One of the first pieces of publicized evidence in the wake of the killing was that three 9mm cartridges left at the scene were found to have been labeled with three phrases: “deny,” “defend,” and “depose.” It was speculated the first two phrases referred to the oft-cited practice of health insurance companies to deny coverage to clients and defend these decisions with legalistic trickery. “Depose,” of course, has multiple meanings, but in this context just two: one might depose a health care company CEO in court, and one might also depose a figure of terrific unaccountable authority, such as a king or tyrant.

As the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino noted, Thompson’s company, UnitedHealth, is a notorious symbol of such unaccountability in our health care system, with the highest claim-denial rate of any private insurance company:

A 2023 class-action lawsuit alleges that the NaviHealth algorithm [used by UnitedHealth] has a “known error rate” of ninety per cent and cites appalling patient stories: one man in Tennessee broke his back, was hospitalized for six days, was moved to a nursing home for eleven days, and then was informed by UnitedHealth that his care would be cut off in two days…After a couple rounds of appeals and reversals, the man left the nursing home and died four days later.

Such stories explain the instant folk heroization of the killer on social media. Thousands of posts that lauded his crime—or, at least, pointedly refused to condemn it—were shot through with the rhetoric of revolution, as if the Adjuster’s murderous act had been the opening move in a class war. There was also romance and raw attraction. In an initial photo made available by police, the public glimpsed a handsome smile on the Adjuster’s half-hooded face, as he appeared to flirt with an employee at the hostel where he holed up prior to the attack. This, as with subsequent photos of the suspect now in custody, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, have given rise to a number of “thirst trap” posts by adoring female fans.

Among the belongings found following Mangione’s arrest on Monday at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Penn., was a 262-word manifesto that appeared to confess to the crime. “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming,” stated the manifesto.

Just as widespread on social media was the gleeful response to Thompson’s death, which often descended into death-delighted schadenfreude by people who apparently don’t care one whit about the gunning down of a 50-year-old father of two from the quiet suburban city of Maple Grave, Minnesota.

After all, Thompson was a parasite, and a terribly destructive one.

The humble Facebook eulogy by UnitedHealth for Thompson garnered so many emoji laughs and claps – 77,000 at last count – that comments were shut down. At LinkedIn, UnitedHealth Group opted to stop comments on its post about Thompson’s death because of the flood of people liking, hearting, and clapping it.

Genuine laughter abounded. A commenter on X worried whether the sidewalk where Thompson collapsed was okay, and another declared Thompson’s gunshot wound a pre-existing condition not covered under UnitedHealthcare policy. “My condolences are out of network,” became the common mocking refrain. Another stated, “I’m sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers.”

Meanwhile, internet sleuths who had in other unsolved cases come together to find murderers decided to sit this one out with aggressive displays of indifference.

Another post on X in favor of the Adjuster, captioned “My official response to the UHC CEO’s murder,” showed two graphs that compared wealth distribution in late eighteenth-century France to wealth distribution in present-day America. The two graphs were roughly the same. Under this post was one that showed a cartoon of the Lorax in colorful Seussian splendor standing by a guillotine and rhyming, “UNLESS someone like you brings out the chippity chop/Nothing’s going to get better. It’s not.”

This was followed by a poster who quoted the French Revolution’s bloody anthem, the Marseillaise, which goes:

Listen to the sound in the fields

The howling of these fearsome soldiers
They are coming into our midst
To cut the throats of your sons and consorts.

In American history, has the assassination of an industry executive in the private sector ever elicited such enormous and widespread support? The last attempted political assassination of a major corporate executive occurred in 1892, when Alexander Berkman tried to kill industrialist Henry Frick over his murderous treatment of steelworkers on strike. The script then, even at the height of the Gilded Age, was very different. Berkman was publicly excoriated and widely condemned as an agent of foreign radicalism, while Frick was put on a victim pedestal. The American public turned against the steelworkers and Berkman was sent to prison.

The reaction to the street-side slaughter of Thompson suggests that, were Berkman to stand trial today, he would enjoy more support than he did during his time. For a number of people, when a predatory-parasitic power elite proves itself willing to sacrifice the public good for its private aggrandizement, shooting them in the head has become an acceptable solution. We’ve tried lawsuits, petitions, elections; nothing has worked.

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