Disability Thinking Weekday: 12/9/24

You have to understand ...

A new week, and three disability links for Monday, December 9, 2024 — all on the same topic.

1. Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing

Dionne Searcey and Madison Malone Kircher, New York Times - December 5, 2024

“The fatal shooting on Wednesday of a top UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, on a Manhattan sidewalk has unleashed a torrent of morbid glee from patients and others who say they have had negative experiences with health insurance companies at some of the hardest times of their lives.”

2. Why "we" want insurance executives dead

Taylor Lorenz, UserMag - December 5, 2024

“Let me be super clear: my post uses a collective "we" and is explaining the public sentiment. It is not me personally saying "I want these executives dead and so we should kill them." I am explaining that thousands of Americans (myself included) are fed up with our barbaric healthcare system and the people at the top who rake in millions while inflicting pain, suffering, and death on millions of innocent people.”

3. Carrie Ann Lucas, Disability Rights Activist and Attorney, Dies Following Denial From Insurance Company

Robyn Powell, Rewire News Group - February 25, 2019

“As she documented on her personal blog in January 2018, Lucas became ill with a bad cold. According to her Facebook page, her health insurer, UnitedHealthcare, refused to pay for a specific medication she needed, owing to its cost of $2,000. Consequently, she had to take a different and less-effective medication, which caused deleterious reactions. Lucas’ health rapidly declined, resulting in numerous hospital stays over the last year and the loss of her ability to speak. The obituary on her Facebook noted, “United Healthcare’s attempt to save $2,000 cost over $1 million in health care costs over the past year.” More importantly, Lucas’ friends and family argue, it cost her her life.”

The outpouring of — what? satisfaction? retribution? schadenfreude? — in the aftermath of last week’s murder of UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Brian Thompson suggests the phrase, “You have to understand …”

Since the news came out of the crime, people online have been drawing an emotional connection between a health insurance company boss’ murder and their own and loved ones’ frustrations, deep, long-lasting traumas, and real, physical losses from health insurance companies’ chronic obstruction and denial of needed medical treatments and equipment.

And some of the most intense and resonant responses have come from disabled people. There aren’t many disabled people who haven’t struggled and / or suffered at some point from health insurance delays and refusals — everything from treatments and therapies to medications and adaptive equipment. This results in anxiety, countless hours of draining, futile followup work, and in far too many worst-case scenarios, unnecessary illness, loss of capability and independence, and death. The dark jokes about Thompson’s murder, alongside harrowing personal stories of suffering at the hands of health insurance companies, make the message clear, even when it’s not explicit.

Meanwhile, the conventional counter-response comes almost exactly as expected — the obvious, more ethically literal but somehow pointless retorts. It’s wrong to celebrate anyone’s murder! Work for reform, not revenge! It’s a bad idea to encourage individual vengeance as a response to systemic injustice! All true. All absolutely true.

Of course it’s bad to be glad about someone being murdered. And the current political climate is an especially bad time to give any credibility to the idea that personal violence is a valid response to injustice, even when it’s only second hand.

But its that really what people mean when they indulge in gallows humor about Thompson’s murder? Is telling real-life stories about suffering from health insurance practices, prompted by the murder, an endorsement of murder as public policy? Of course not. It would be obtuse not to see that it’s troubling and possibly harmful to publicly joke about someone’s murder. But it’s just as obtuse to not recognize that this kind of emotional response is completely understandable. Drawing uncomfortable connections between a health insurance CEO’s murder and health care injustice has a pretty solid logic behind it.

To understand the rage and pettiness, you have to understand what it’s like to be sick or disabled and depend on a health care bureaucracy designed not just for efficiency, but for profit — a system largely insulated from the human consequences of their decisions.

And a dose of understanding right now could serve as a useful signal to health insurance companies and other gatekeepers in the medical profession. Justified or not, (and of course it’s always a mix of both), Americans are really angry, really exhausted, and about at the end of their tether about health care. Maybe it’s time for everyone involved — especially health insurance companies — to treat this moment as a time not for sanctimony, but for sincere self-reflection and generous empathy.

As with so many moral gray areas in public life and policy, context does not excuse bad behavior or corrosive sentiments that can sometimes read like incitements. But context does help explain these things. And it would be foolish not to listen, and at least try to understand.

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Disability Thinking Weekday is moving!

As explained in the December 2 newsletter, we are moving from Substack to Ghost on January 1, 2025. I had asked for people to help me with the approximately $400 in moving expenses, by renewing their paid subscriptions early. Unfortunately, Substack doesn’t seem to allow this. So there are two options if you want to provide some extra support:

1. Click the link to make a one-time donation through Ko-Fi, or,

2. Wait until the move in January, and start a new annual membership then.

Either way, annual paid memberships will still be set at a discounted price of $40 through December and January.