A man holds a sign featuring Deny, Defend, Depose, the words written on the bullets used to kill Brian Thompson, over the former UnitedHealthcare C.E.O.’s face.

The Health-Care Blame Game

Brian Thompson’s murder revealed a simmering rage toward the insurance industry. But are health executives responsible for the public’s woes or are they just well-paid cogs?

By Bethany McLean

One of the most jarring of the many jarring things that happened in 2024 was the outpouring of support for Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Brian Thompson. As I walked through Washington Square Park over the holidays, protesters chanted, “Profits over people!” In a tragic instant, Thompson became a scapegoat for the legitimate—but until now, amorphous—rage people have about America’s health-care system, in which a company’s profits can be someone else’s broken life.

A few weeks after Mangione fatally shot Thompson, The New York Times reported that for decades, as the opioid crisis claimed more and more lives, the middlemen that could have limited the flow of drugs instead continued to facilitate it—because they were being paid billions of dollars to do so by the opioid manufacturers, including Purdue Pharma. When one suggested that helping to stop the epidemic might have been the right thing to do, another responded, “The rebates we collected prevented us from doing it.”