Everybody’s Got the Right
On Going ‘Bickle mode’ in the age of Mass Social Murderers.
“Everybody’s got the right
To be happy
Say, “Enough!”
It’s not as tough
As it seems!
Don’t be scared you won’t prevail,
Everybody’s free to fail,
No one can be put in jail
For their dreams!”
— “Everybody’s Got the Right,” from Assassins, Stephen Sondheim
“You’re only as healthy as you feel”
— Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver
Yesterday, Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthCare, one of the USA’s largest health insurers, was assassinated in midtown Manhattan by an unidentified gunman at 6.45am local time. Security footage shows the gunman walking up behind Thompson and shooting him. A nearby witness flees as Thompson stumbles then falls to the ground, before the gunman walks over and fires more rounds into him.
Detectives discovered writing on shell casings found at the scene that read: “deny,” “defend,” and “depose.”
Thompson’s net worth was estimated at approximately $42.9 million, as of February 16. 2024. A significant amount of his wealth stemmed from his ownership of UnitedHealth Inc. shares. In February, he sold $82,348 units of stock valued at over $21 million.
In November 2023, UnitedHealth was taken to court for deploying an AI model to deny elderly patients coverage. It was revealed that the company was aware the AI model had a 90% error rate, overriding determinations made by patients’ physicians.
In May of this year, the Hollywood Firefighters' Pension Fund filed a lawsuit against Thompson, alleging he had sold over $15 million of UnitedHealth stock despite being aware of an active antitrust investigation into the company by the Justice Department, an investigation he did not disclose to investors or the public.
UHC maintains a claim denial rate of 32%, the highest in the country.
This is just a little context before we wrap our heads around the online response to Thompson’s death, which was, for lack of a better word, jubilant.
Those of us in Australia and elsewhere like to talk about the U.S. healthcare system as an abstract bogeyman, the epitome of seppo silly-buggery, alongside the whole gun control thing. But witnessing — and experiencing — the beast up close takes the fun out of mocking it (and by extension, seppos) a fair bit (not entirely, dw).
In my time living in New York (off and on between 2017-2019), and my months long amtrak trip around the States (don’t do this, it’s hell) in 2014, the most nightmarish nightmares recounted to me (and Americans love speaking in nightmares, as they live in one) all intersected with their barbarous healthcare system.
Whether it was a friend recounting how they lost half their family, and their town, to the opioid epidemic, or an Iraq War vet on the train to Dallas telling me about his abuse in an underfunded Veteran’s hospital, or a neighbour having their broken ankle (broken at work) reset by another neighbour (a former horse veterinarian) to avoid hospital fees, every anecdote a seppo spins of sickness, disability, injury, death and the bills that come with them, are tailor made to make those passing through say, “yikes” and “thank god I don’t live here.”
I was one such yikes-er, until I found myself fainting in the kitchen of the loft I lived in above a working architectural glue factory (it gave me chemical pneumonia, I loved the place) in 2018. I was in white-hot agony from what turned out to be a kidney stone. My roommates, four of whom were Australian at the time, delivered me to the public hospital ten or so minutes away.
There, I was left leaning against the wall of an emergency room straight out of the (what I thought were) over the top hospital soaps of my childhood. I was in pain, but I could manage. Until I couldn’t. Before long, I was sobbing, pleading with any nurse or doctor running by to help me. Then, I was just screaming. The agony was white hot, I lost all control. I pissed a fountain of excruciating blood. I didn’t know where, or who, I was.
I don’t know how long I was propped against the wall like that howling for help, but eventually an elderly black man on an IV drip on a bed nearby seized a passing nurse, pointed at me, and said “you better help that young man, I think he’s dying.”
I was finally given a bed, where I was left for two or so hours screaming uncontrollably until a nurse arrived to check on me. I begged for painkillers, which turned out to be a rookie mistake. I was a little underweight at the time, my diet consisting of my home-cooking (bad) and my (prescription) Vyvanse (good). I was bleach blonde, incredibly pale, and had an inscrutable foreign accent. As my 80+ year old aunt said on my return home the previous Christmas, “You look like Sickboy from Trainspotting” (her knowing who that is continues to blow my mind some 7 years later). In short, I looked like a junky, so they would not give me painkillers of any stripe.
When the doctor did arrive bedside, he asked me to hand over my wallet in the style of an impatient mugger. He emptied my cards out on the bed. Ok, I wasn’t lying about being Australian. Did I have insurance? Yes, thank god, I had Medibank travel insurance. What the hell is Medibank? It’s an Australian insurer. He took my health card and vanished.
Somewhere in there my roommates visited me, and eventually I was wheeled in for a scan, which revealed that I had some big ol’ kidney stones rattling around in my left kidney, which was also infected, making the pain a million times worse than it otherwise would have been.
The hospital confirmed Medibank was real. I was given one oxycontin pill, a sheet of antibiotics, a sieve and sample-jar to catch/place my stone in, before they put me out into the street at 2am with a dead phone, in the middle of a snowstorm. I hobbled back to my glue factory in agony.
I passed my stone a few days after that (no need for details).
A week later, I had my follow up with the hospital’s kidney guy, an elderly Jewish man who introduced himself to me, confidently, as a Trotskyite. He ranted and raved about the US healthcare system for about fifteen minutes, and when he found out how they’d treated me, that they hadn’t given me any painkillers, he called the emergency room then and there and bagged some poor bastard out with an energy that was enviable.
I then received my bill. My five hours in the emergency room, the scan, and the follow-up visit cost me roughly $15k, American. If I had not had travel insurance, that would have been the end of me, I can tell you that much.
Cut to eight months later. I am back living at the Glue Factory after having gone home in January with a bad case of what turned out to be chemical pneumonia (“this is a 19th century disease,” my doctor said) and getting stuck in Perth by some other unforeseeable personal calamities. My roommate presents me with a pile of letters — bills from the hospital claiming I owe them $15k, with interest. But my insurance paid them out? I call. Oh, it’s not us, the hospital admin tells me, it’s some third-party debt collector contracted by some multi-armed healthcare megacorp to act as a middleman for medical debts, in the hopes of intersecting your payment and essentially getting you to pay twice (?). I am beyond confused. Like a standover man? I ask. Yeah, sorta, the hospital admin tells me. Is that legal? I ask. Wellllllllllllllllll—
Overwhelmed by the labyrinthine depths of American corporate graft, I decided to do the most American thing I could think of: ignore my so-called debts until they went away.
What a nightmare!
This is my round about way of telling you, my fellow Australians, that America’s turbo-charged Moloch of a healthcare system is no joke, and that also, this is why the brutal yet efficient assassination of one of said system’s most rapacious CEOs is.
Thompson’s death was immediately memeified across all social media platforms. Schadenfreude stocks skyrocketed:
The comment sections had the energy of a small-town barn dance, with folks giddy at the untimely demise of some cruel cattle baron who’d once ran their dog down in the street. Everybody took the opportunity to share a slice of their personal hell within the larger hell that is the US healthcare system. Never have I seen the facebook laugh react clock-in so much overtime.
Here was a man who was the head of a corporation which was a big cog in a bigger machine that had been torturing and killing these people, and their loved ones, their entire lives. The rage, the grief, the tears are more than justified, and so is their giddy glee at his death.
This is the fate of the Mass Social Murderer — not assassination, necessarily, but the celebration of it. This is what you get for crushing millions of people into paste while living high on the hog. Dancing in the streets. Jokes and jubilation. Your tombstone a meme of Spongebob holding a gun that reads “had to do it to him.” This is the only thing you’ll own in abundance — this wealth of mockery — that can pass with you through the eye of the needle on your way to the afterlife/hell — unfathomable, unquantifiable, loathing and disdain.
Thompson’s killing was a visceral act of wish-fulfillment. The assassination of the CEO has become a shared fantasy. An inevitable one, I’d argue. This is the daydream of a billion stepped on workers, made real. When all avenues of justice and frustration are cut off — when the media, the courts, government, protest, unions, and reform — are either bent towards capital, or disappeared on its behalf, then shooting your oppressor in the back of the skull becomes a more and more appealing (and practical) course of action.
The act of going “Bickle-mode,” that is decking yourself out like Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver and washing the “scum off the streets,” was once the delusional brain-fart of mass-shooter neo-nazis and the terminally troppo. But we live in terminally troppo times, and the goal posts that define “scum” are forever being shifted by forces beyond most people’s reckoning. What forces we can easily recognise — those of debt and poverty and precarity — offer up a telescope that tilt’s skyward, to the corporate box and corner offices of men like Thompson, whose scumminess is so baked into their operation that they can’t help but wear it with something resembling pride, like a fine Armani suit of shitheadedness.
Men like Thompson are the ones daring you to go Bickle-mode. This is the inevitable end point of capitalism’s war on life. The more life they deny, the less life folks have to lose. Once you’re left with nothing, what’s to stop you from reducing the people that took it all from you to nothing, also? What else do they expect you to do, if you refuse to roll over and die on behalf of them and their bonuses? Applaud them? (I think they do expect this, tragically)
This is the closest our corporate overlords may ever get to being fairly taxed. The price of profiting from human misery might just be a huge target on your back, the pay-off millions of people laughing when you’re denied that which you got rich denying others: life.
