CEO Lives Matter

The glee over the assassination of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO exhibits a moral decadence in our culture.

Picture this scenario: a black activist is assassinated in cold blood by a white supremacist. Following the heinous crime, there is an outpouring of malice for the victim, and of admiration for the perpetrator. The white supremacist becomes an internet sensation and a meme. People rush to victim-blaming: “Well, he’s black, and we all know what such people have done.” More moderate commentators are quick to assure us that every murder is to be condemned, but point out that the lack of sympathy for the victim highlights a widespread rage against black criminality.

How would you react to the above scenario? As a decent human being, you would feel disgust at what makes such sickening sentiments commonplace. You would wonder what has brought us to this moral decadence, and how to fix it. Well, you do live in such a society. Whitewashing the murder of a black person because he is black has, thankfully, become shameful in the West. “Black Lives Matter” was shouted by millions of voices in 2020. But it turns out that there is one group whose lives do not matter: the rich, the CEOs of big companies, the “1%.”

This appalling prejudice became evident in the aftermath of the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. The alleged perpetrator, Luigi Mangione, received an outpouring of support, lionized by many on the internet. Four in ten young people found the assassination “somewhat” or “completely” acceptable. A professor at an Ivy League university rushed to remind us that the real victim is not the murdered CEO, but the thousands of people who die every year, allegedly because of the greed of the likes of the deceased. Senator Elizabeth Warren characterized the assassination as a “warning to everyone in the health care system.”

Notice that in all this public vitriol, no specific allegations were made against Thompson, no purported criminal behavior that could at least generate some legitimate sympathy for Mangione appointing himself Thompson’s judge, jury, and executioner.

Thompson’s crime was his work: as UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, he ran a profitable health insurance company. Today, both aspects of his achievement count as sin.

Everyone else in today’s economy is permitted to seek his own profit, be it a fast food worker lobbying for an increase in the minimum wage, a software engineer resigning from his job for a better offer, or Taylor Swift making hundreds of millions from her Eras Tour. But not CEOs of big businesses. They are smeared as exploiters and victimizers, whom the government should control and shackle.

We hear the objection: Thompson’s sin is not that he was CEO of a large company, but CEO of a health insurer. However, the idea that Taylor Swift is creating a valuable product, worth a ticket in the hundreds of dollars, but health insurance companies, which charge significant premiums to provide much needed medical coverage, are not, is laughable if it were not so dangerous.

Do health insurers deny some claims? Of course. One reason is that some claims fall outside the contractual agreement. Another reason is the amount of fraud in the system. The government puts fraudulent COVID-19 claims, for example, in the billions of dollars. No company should pay recipients money they are not entitled to. Unfortunately legitimate claims are sometimes denied in efforts to combat fraudulent claims. For this there are dispute resolution mechanisms, including, ultimately, civil courts to settle the obligations of a contract. Another significant reason is government control of the industry. Any setup like ours, in which prices are absent — our healthcare providers cannot tell us in advance how much a service or procedure will cost and we neither ask nor shop around, because we expect a third party to foot whatever bill arrives — is not a real market. Further, government deprives health insurers of the full freedom to decide what coverages to offer at what price, which can create an adversarial relationship with customers. Not a recipe for exemplary customer service.

But none of this detracts from the overall value health insurance companies and their leaders provide. As a long-term customer of UnitedHealthcare, our employer and its employees have enjoyed a high level of care for years. The idea that Brian Thompson is our exploiter is perverse.

The job of a CEO of a large enterprise is complicated and demanding. Few people can do it successfully. This is one reason people like Thompson are paid well. The CEO’s role is somewhat equivalent to the manager of a sports team, though more complex: CEOs have to come up with the strategy, tactics, and long-term vision for the company, while managing a diverse group of people who need to be inspired by that vision. They need a bird’s eye view not only of the company they run, but of the whole industry, which is often global. They have to keep an eye on the future, and try to predict shifts and trends while being ready for unforeseen changes. When CEOs do this successfully, they produce enormous value, which is the basic reason they are paid well.

And Thompson, as CEO of a health insurer, deserves a special kind of respect. Most of us have heard of brain drains across borders, such as when productive people flee Castro’s Cuba or Maduro’s Venezuela for freer countries. But there are also brain drains within countries, as productive individuals flee more controlled industries for less controlled. One reason Silicon Valley attracts many of America’s best minds is that, at least up until now, it is perhaps America’s freest major industry. Health care, by contrast, is one of the most controlled. The number of government edicts and bureaucrats one must deal with in health care is difficult to fathom. Who wants to work in such an environment? But many productive people — doctors, nurses, hospital managers and CEOs of health insurers — continue to do so because they love the work. They keep an unhealthy system from further degenerating. We should be grateful for their work and actually cheer them on, as many of us cheered on nurses and doctors operating in difficult working conditions during the pandemic.

In Thompson’s case, specifically, we should acknowledge that literally millions of customers have benefited from his work by paying for coverage from UnitedHealthcare.

But we shouldn’t have to pay for health care, many people claim. Health care is a right. It should be free. Never explained is who will waive their magic wand and provide for free the enormously complex achievement that is modern health care. But pound into people’s heads the idea that health care is our right, and we will view any denial of coverage by a health insurer as a crime. This is the philosophic idea that explains Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s widely shared viewpoint in the aftermath of Thompson’s murder. Murdering a CEO is never justified, she said, but we must understand that those whose claims are denied by health insurers experience such events as violence too. If you are being deprived of what is yours by right, you are being coerced.

It is for this fantasy that Brian Thompson had to pay with his life.

Those of us who understand how great the work of business leaders is, are the ones who need to stand up. First, tell them you appreciate their work and admire their achievements. And when they are unjustly maligned, defend them, as you would defend any other unjustifiably accused group of people. Justice requires us to say it loud and clear: CEO lives matter.