AILSA CHANG, HOST:
For almost a week, there have been more questions than answers surrounding the brazen murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel. One of the most important questions may have been answered yesterday, when 26-year-old Luigi Mangione was arrested in Pennsylvania. Mangione has been charged with murder, illegal possession of a firearm and lying about his identity. The justice system will ultimately determine whether he is guilty of those crimes. But a separate question lingers - one that may be more difficult to answer. Why have so many Americans embraced the killing, even expressing glee? That is something New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino has been exploring. She joins us now. Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
JIA TOLENTINO: Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.
CHANG: It's great to have you back. So the title of this article is, "A Man Was Murdered In Cold Blood And You're Laughing?" Can I just ask you, personally - how surprised were you when you saw all the reaction on social media and in comments on news stories about the news of Thompson's murder - people celebrating, joking?
TOLENTINO: I mean, it's certainly remarkable. It's certainly interesting. But I did not find the response shocking.
CHANG: You actually - you note some of the more breathtaking responses to this shooting. Can you just share a couple of examples that really stayed with you as you were scanning the comments in all the social media posts?
TOLENTINO: Yeah. Well, so the immediate joke thousands and thousands of people were posting were, I'm sorry. Prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers, you know? And there was another person that wrote, does he have a history of shootings? Denied coverage. You know, UnitedHealthcare posted a announcement about Thompson's death on LinkedIn and had to disable comments because thousands and thousands and thousands of people were posting ha-ha responses - like, cry-laughing faces as the response. And, yeah, that struck me as remarkable.
CHANG: I mean, let's just step back and talk about, like, what happened. This was a murder in public, in a busy part of Manhattan. Thompson was shot in the back. He is the father of two sons. What do you think it does say about the health insurance industry in this country - that people were quite literally laughing at this murder, celebrating his death?
TOLENTINO: Well, I think that there are many forms that violence can take. We tend to focus on acts of violence that are like Thompson's murder - right? - direct, interpersonal violence, right? But there's a lot of other types of it. An extremely common way that a life is unjustly cut short is by the denial of health care.
CHANG: Right. You write that Thompson's murder is one symptom of the American appetite for violence. His line of work is another.
TOLENTINO: Right. You know, this corporation is the eighth-largest company in the world. It is incredibly profitable, and not despite the fact, but because of the fact that it routinely denies an egregious amount of care to its patients. Its claim denial rate is twice the industry average. UnitedHealthcare denies 32- to 33% of all care requested by a doctor. And so the response - the glee that people are expressing at this cold-blooded murder is illuminating the fact that many people think of the private health care system in the U.S. - and specifically UnitedHealthcare - as a company that itself has achieved these billions and billions and billions of dollars of profits in not provisioning health care but indirectly provisioning death through a kind of severe and immoral and unjust violence on its own.
CHANG: You write that there's indifference on both sides of what we have seen - the indifference of so many people who are reacting to Thompson's death, but also this indifference that you're talking about right now of health insurance companies and the CEO class, as you put it, to the suffering and death of ordinary people. But let me ask you - how do you break this stalemate of indifference? Can you, or are we all locked into it?
TOLENTINO: Well, you know, one causes the other. The indifference of people to Thompson's murder was entirely, I think, because of the indifference of these health care companies, and if not directly Thompson - obviously, he was not directly responsible for every denied claim, but he presided over it. And me personally, with my own anti-capitalist views, do I think that being a CEO of a company like UnitedHealthcare, with its ideological responsibilities to its shareholders - do I think that that's compatible with actually taking care of patients? I don't. And I think that puts us in this strange moment where that's suddenly baldly out in the open.
CHANG: Jia Tolentino, staff writer at The New Yorker - her latest article is called "A Man Was Murdered In Cold Blood And You're Laughing?" Thank you so much for speaking with us today.
TOLENTINO: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
CHANG: We reached out to UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, for comment on the social media reaction to Thompson's death. They directed us to a statement that said in part, quote, "our priorities are first and foremost supporting Brian's family, ensuring the safety of our employees and working with law enforcement to bring the perpetrator to justice."
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