Brian Thompson was the CEO of UnitedHealth Group’s (UHG) health insurance products division until Luigi Mangione walked up to him in a hotel lobby in New York City just a few days ago on December 4, 2024 and calmly shot him four times until his gun jammed. Mr. Mangione then stood there calmly trying to unjam the gun until he gave up and fled into the city.

UHG is a multinational health insurance and services company that sells insurance products and health care services*. All told, UHG is the world’s ninth-largest company by revenue and the largest health care company by revenue, ranking 8th on the 2024 Fortune Global 500. In 2024 the company was valued at USD$474.3 billion.

Mr. Mangione is a twenty-six year old member of a prominent Pennsylvania family. He was the 2016 class valedictorian of a prestigious Pennsylvania private school and a 2020 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a Master’s degree in computer and information science. He worked in that field after being graduated.

Mr. Mangione prepared for the assassination by etching the words “delay”, “deny”, and “depose” on the bullets and shell casings he used to assassinate Mr. Thompson. Words similar to these had shown up in prior criticisms of the health insurance industry, which are systems intended to distribute financial risk.

The United States, it seems, is wrestling with its own systematic injustice.

Mr. Thompson was a father, husband and a human being. Like all of us, he was born with inherent worth and dignity that cannot be taken away from him. We should be upset by the tragedy of his assassination. Many of you have expressed concern that you are struggling with feeling compassion toward Mr. Thompson. I am with you, I am struggling with it as well.

Despite these feelings, our faith calls us to be fundamentally bothered about his assassination, but that’s only the tip of the proverbial iceberg: Our faith calls us to be even more upset about the circumstances that led to his assassination.

The United States’ health insurance industry machine, like so many other unjust economic machines in our world, is working just as it was designed to work. It is a for-profit system, which means that it is intentionally designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the wealthy. To make that happen, it is intentionally complex and it overtly prioritizes profit over the welfare of the very people it was ostensibly designed to serve. The guardians and managers of that system are rewarded not for patient outcomes, but rather for business outcomes…profit.

As we learn more, it appears that Mr. Mangione’s motivations were mostly ideological; a political statement rather than retribution for some ill done upon him by UHC or some other related entity. Even though his actions did not come from a place of personal loss or the pain of a loved one, it is not hard to imagine an ample supply of individual victims of this machine willing to stand in his shoes.

The heath insurance industry in the United States is set up so that the poor, the weak and even the middle-class are often left having to choose between financial devastation and poor treatment results in exchange for profits.

Mr. Mangione’s actions represent the sentiments of a weary United States. You don’t have to look too hard to see proof that the economic and governmental machines that we think exist to improve our chance at happiness actually exist for some other reason and to benefit a more and more exclusive group of people. These very systems meant to protect and sustain us abandon far too many of us.

We are not alone. The truth is that the way the system is set up, Mr. Thompson was really not much more than a pawn in the system, albeit a very well paid** pawn. If it weren’t Mr. Thompson, it would have been someone else. Injustice machines like our health insurance industry chew up people like Mr. Thompson much in the same way they chew up everyone else with whom they come into contact.

It is differently insidious for people like Mr. Thompson who are praised and rewarded for being guardians of these injustice machines. The more injustice, the more profit, the more reward. I can see how people like Mr. Thompson could be morally scrambled.

When we protest these injustice machines, we want them to be “fixed”. The health insurance industry in this newly great nation does not need to be fixed. It needs to be torn down to the ground and completely rebuilt.

The debacle that Obamacare is and the death it will shortly endure serve as proof that this nation does not have the strength of character to even consider correcting this injustice. Instead, we will just continue to let people die for want of available treatment at a rate that is low enough to not draw too much attention to it. Out of sight, out of mind. We will hire bodyguards for the guardians of the unjust machines and soon this incident will all be regretfully behind us with no action taken. Same as gun control.

Injustice is the real killer, and nobody is addressing it.

* Yes. They have been allowed to set themselves up to make money whether their clients are sick or well. Who let that happen?

** I have seen estimates of $9,900,000 per year.