Violence is wrong. The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was wrong.
My heart goes out to his family and all who worked with Brian in his many stations in life that led to his journey to the head of one of the largest healthcare systems in the world.
The willingness to glorify solving conflicts with violence is one of the core problems in our society today. A recent John Hopkins study reported that someone dies from gun violence every 11 minutes.
But I get the frustration expressed online following Mr. Thompson’s murder. I have frustrations. And so do a lot of people.
My father used to say, laughter is often an expression of a pain that didn’t happen. No, Mr. Thompson did not die because he was transported to an out-of-network hospital.
However, some people truly get denied care because the help they need is out-of-network with their insurance plan.
My wife has twice been denied care in the past few months by the same insurance company that pays most of my salary. She went to the ER on November 24th and we are now being told that she cannot have a CAT scan at Phoebe Sumter Hospital until December 27th to find out what treatment might be available for her pain. If she was a football player for the University of Georgia, her CAT scan would have been done the next day.
Sometimes these types of delays do result in death.
So, I write as someone who fully participates in the American healthcare system and as someone who has seen it fail people including my own loved ones.
But I have also heard countless stories of how access to affordable healthcare have helped them through cancer treatments, cardiac events and difficult pregnancies.
Having access to affordable healthcare allows people to be proactive in living healthy and prevents catastrophic financial debt.
We know vaccines, free wellness checkups, and preventative and prenatal care are all critical to preventing escalating risk of harm, disease, and even death. We also know that providers should never have to live in fear of providing women healthcare in all its essential forms.
Violence is wrong. The systemic denial of claims and access to affordable care is a form of violence. There are many causes for this “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” pattern of profits over patients’ wellbeing that are being discussed. And we should be discussing it.
We should be discussing it like our lives depend on it.
Violence in all its forms is wrong. And those jokes… are a form of violence too. Because our system causes pain that continues to unnecessarily happen in a nation as wealthy as ours.
Collectively, we need to own the problem of our broken healthcare system.
One of the greatest skills of leadership is to look to other systems to benchmark their successes and adopt things that work and jettison things that do harm.
