Killing of insurance exec was just ‘chickens coming home to roost,’ says Missouri prof | Opinion

When UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down by a lone assassin in midtown Manhattan last week, the first reaction was shock. CEOs are not a common target of gunfire.

The second reaction was joy in a blizzard of social media postings across the internet. The insurance company’s Facebook post about the murder was defaced with 41,000 laughing emojis out of 46,000 reactions before the firm shut down comments. “We want these executives dead,” said one prominent figure on social media site Bluesky.

Understandable anger at insurance companies in general and UnitedHealthcare in particular fueled the dark expressions of emotion. On the Better Business Bureau’s website, 1,400 customer reviews give the insurer of 50 million Americans one star out of five.

But when the alleged shooter turned out to be Luigi Mangione, an Ivy League-educated son of privilege, some of the air went out of the insurance company hate. The son of a gazillionaire real estate philanthropist in Maryland isn’t the righteous revolutionary folks with their laughing emojis wanted.

After bullet casings were left on the scene with words such as “deny,” “defend” and “depose” on them, people had expected the perpetrator to be the obvious victim of a predatory insurance company’s denial of coverage in some tear-jerking saga we could all relate to. It is hard to imagine a family of such wealth harboring such a story.

In Missouri, Yolonda Wilson, an associate professor of health care ethics at St. Louis University, was not “rejoicing,” but she also wasn’t “sad” about the cold-blooded murder when she told her story of egregious treatment by UnitedHealthcare on X.

She finished her tale with her ethical take on the murder: “So, while I’m not rejoicing about the UHC CEO being shot dead in the street, I’m not sad about it, either. People deserve better than the US health insurance industry, and chickens come home to roost.” In other words, the CEO’s murder was the natural outcome of his company’s behavior. Twenty-three thousand people liked that post and 623,000 viewed it.

Later, she shared another X user’s take on the killing: “Denying people life saving medical procedures is … work our society should not and will not tolerate by whatever means necessary.”

“By whatever means necessary” being a euphemism for revolutionary violence.

Wilson is no newcomer to big topics on the national debate stage. She was promoted as a rising pundit on the left by the nonprofit Op-Ed Project and she has been writing for peer-reviewed bioethics journals since 2016, the year before she was a visiting bioethics scholar at the National Institutes of Health.

Even ethics profs can post in anger and have second thoughts later, so I reached out to her and St. Louis University to get some clarity on whether Wilson thought murdering health insurance executives was justified. I thought that was a little extreme, even for universities today. She didn’t respond to several efforts to reach her.

She did have time to speak with National Public Radio, which didn’t mention her “chickens coming home to roost” comment. They focused on her infuriating personal story.

But readers by the hundred sure responded to that part of her post. Some echoing her arguments in stronger terms. “Why not rejoice?“ asked one. There’s something dangerous about a tenured radical telling hundreds of thousands of people that violence is understandable, maybe even justified, against a businessman pursuing a legal business.

Her views sound more than a bit like extreme pro-lifers in the 1980s and 1990s, when abortion providers were being shot and bombed for their perfectly legal but controversial work. I don’t remember any bioethics professors then standing up for using “any means necessary” to curb abortions or that the deadly violence was just “chickens coming home to roost.”

Any ethicist should know that justifying violence is a bad idea at the best of times. With a nation as divided as ours, it seems, well, a little unwise.

I wondered whether any of the other ethicists at St. Louis University disagreed with Wilson and whether any intended to speak up, so I reached out to Erica Salter, the medical ethics department chair. No response from her either.

That’s too bad because there’s another version of the poultry cliche Wilson repeated on X: Curses, like chickens, come home to roost. Let’s hope they do not.

This story was originally published December 10, 2024 at 9:35 AM with the headline "Killing of insurance exec was just ‘chickens coming home to roost,’ says Missouri prof | Opinion."