The revolution will not be livestreamed

Doctors in one of the Internet’s top medical communities have turned on the murdered UnitedHealthcare (UHC) CEO Brian Thompson in such brutal fashion that Reddit moderators deleted a thread on the killing.

The moderators of r/medicine closed the thread, posted Wednesday after news broke that Thompson was shot dead outside the New York Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan, after it racked up over 500 replies.

The commenters overwhelmingly criticized—and satirized—the insurer’s alleged denial of coverage to sick and dying Americans in order to juice profits.

The top comment, which received hundreds of supporting upvotes from other users, mocked UHC’s notorious track record for refusing to pay out insurance claims and is written as a lengthy, spoof rejection letter from the company.

Addressed to an unnamed applicant—following “a careful review of the claim submitted for emergency services on December 4, 2024″—it informs them they are being rejected for coverage because “you failed to obtain prior authorization before seeking care for the gunshot wound to your chest.”

“If you would like to appeal the fatal gunshot, please call 1-800-555-1234 with case # 123456789P to initiate a peer to peer within 48 hours of the fatal gun shot,” wrote one user.

Another paraphrased the early 20th Century trade union lawyer Clarence Darrow: ″I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”

Dozens and dozens more expressed similar sentiment.

That original thread may have been deleted but criticism of Thompson on Reddit has not died down. Roughly 16 hours after the deleted post was made in r/medicine, another user made a separate post soliciting thoughts on the murder. It has remained up.

As with the previous thread, some comments contain humor or outrage expressed at UHC.

But others—including from doctors and medical professionals—offer incisive and unsparing critiques of Thompson’s business practices.

One medical doctor, whose identity the Daily Beast confirmed, commented with sympathy for Thompson’s family and said the killer should be charged with murder, but then wondered about the damage the CEO had done.

“I cannot even guess how many person-years UHC has taken from patients and their families through denials,” they wrote. “It has to be on the order of millions. His death won’t make that better, but it’s hard for me to sympathize when so many people have suffered because of his company.”

It was too much the way… to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown — as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it — as if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not in plain terms recorded what they saw. . . All the devouring and insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realization, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a spring, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms.

A Tale of Two Cities

Apparently this is beginning to encourage the others:

Insurance company Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield said it will reverse a policy that would have resulted in coverage for anesthesia services being potentially capped in Connecticut, Missouri and New York.

The policy would have seen the insurance provider predetermine the time allowed for anesthesia care during a surgery or procedure and cover care only over that period.

“There has been significant widespread misinformation about an update to our anesthesia policy,” Anthem BCBS said in a statement to ABC News. “As a result, we have decided to not proceed with this policy change. To be clear, it never was and never will be the policy of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield to not pay for medically necessary anesthesia services. The proposed update to the policy was only designed to clarify the appropriateness of anesthesia consistent with well-established clinical guidelines.”