A CEO’s Tragic Death Sparks Debate

Morality in Memes

A CEO was recently killed. Intentionally. He was the head of United Healthcare. His name was Brian Thompson. The internet went wild, I hear, with tasteless jokes. Then, as I was flipping through Facebook, I saw a post from a man named Carl of the Daily Ridge, a local publication. It went as follows:

I’m thoroughly disgusted! I’m a big supporter of the first amendment! However, there is a time and place for everything. These memes going around regard the death of the United Healthcare CEO, who was straight up assassinated, is appalling! I guess some may find funny points from this, but it is so morally inappropriate. He didn’t start the company or create all the processes and procedures. In no way anything he has done warrants what occurred. I can see people making jokes if something similar happened to me. ‘Oh, he posted all the time about other people, Karma!’ Don’t think that it couldn’t happen. Both myself and business partner have been threatened multiple times for simply reporting the news. Others post the same thing, we just happen to have built a better audience and are better at it than most of our competitors. So I just hope you take a moment to think before you make that crude joke or share that crude post. CEO Thompson was a husband, father of two along with being someone’s son and brother.

Within a couple of days, the murder resulted in a significant negative trend on United’s stock, a 5.2%, price drop which weighed down both the Dow and S&P 500. The jokes were mean. Social medias’ funny buttons were pushed by everyone, it seemed. The killer, became an instant folk hero … for no good reason.

At one time my healthcare company was United Healthcare. It was a good system, I thought, but apparently not for all. If you are on the Medicare Advantage program, it is great! If your not, it’s not.

In one on-the-fly review of people’s opinions on the issue of healthcare, it appeared that those who didn’t like United, didn’t like it a lot, as in hatred a lot. The memes and jokes brought out that a lot of people possessed serious hatred for any CEO of any for-profit healthcare company. In a way I don’t blame them. Our healthcare system really does suck the big one, but to celebrate a public assassination in the United States? That was a bridge too far.

The events that led to Thompson’s death reminded me of the movie The Rainmaker. It was produced in 1997. The movie was about an underdog lawyer who takes on a health insurance company. The company was unwilling to cover an experimental procedure to save a young man’s life. A young Matt Damon plays the underdog lawyer and ends up the movie’s hero. No if, and’s or but’s, in Rainmaker, the representatives and lawyers of the for-profit insurance company, Great Benefit, were the villains, the scoundrels, the evil-doers. They had no redeemable human qualities.

Americans are mad. The election for POTUS this year was testament of that. If one of the things they have been mad about is the high cost of healthcare, then they should’ve voted for universal healthcare, a.k.a., Medicare for all. They simply should not have voted for the orange clown who’s looking to rid Americans of any healthcare plan whatsoever.

In the end, my buddy, Carl of the Daily Ridge, ended up feeling better for the release of his anger at the crude jokes. He ended up making good points but his readership questioned his putting his opinion on a news page. Being the ethical individual that he is, he started an opinion page for comments like his. You can find it on Facebook at Let’s Talk Polk.