Word from Woehlk: A Christmas conversation starter

Over Christmas, I plan to bring my typical holiday joy to the proceedings by asking everyone who joins us to share an experience they had with their health insurance provider.

I'll probably wait until after presents.

If you did the same, how many adults do you think wouldn't have a story to tell? One? Two? Zero?

Doesn't every American adult have some story to share about how their health insurance company made it more difficult to get the care they needed? Maybe it's financial hardship, maybe it's not covering a needed medication, maybe it's denying claims — the list goes on and we all have a frame of reference for them running through our heads right now.

In my relatively short life so far, the sum of the many maddening experiences I've had with my health insurance company are decidedly small potatoes in the grand scheme of spuds. I'm lucky and privileged that health insurance companies are only a deep-seated frustration in my life and not an ever-present weight as suffocating as any disease.

We both know millions of others aren't as lucky.

Of course it was the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week that brought health insurance to the top of my mind, as it did for millions of others across the country.

Mr. Thompson's killing reminded me that health insurance companies are not monolithic. They're headed by people. People like Mr. Thompson. And that means that the things they do aren't laws of nature that simply exist and must be dealt with. Health insurance companies and their exploitative policies are created by people who have the power to change them.

They just don't. And we don't do anything about it.

Mr. Thompson wore ties, probably gave to charity, surely had friends. He wore quarter-zip fleeces. He had a wife and kids who loved him and whom he loved. He was the kind of man who, undoubtedly, would smile and shake your hand, maybe talk to you about ice fishing back home in Minnesota and his favorite hotdish recipes.

Mr. Thompson is nothing like, say, Ken Rex McElroy, who committed such horrible, personal evils that when he, too, was gunned down in broad daylight, no one said a word. But with people like Mr. Thompson, we seem to work so hard to diminish the unconscionable things they do. We warp, bend and stretch the values and beliefs that we tell ourselves we hold so dear just so that we can ignore the everyday evils people like him perpetrate, just so that we don't have to acknowledge that they perpetrate them right in front of us with our tacit consent.

The fact is, every time someone started a GoFundMe to pay for an ER stay, Mr. Thompson got a little richer. Every time someone got frustrated and just paid a confusingly high bill, Mr. Thompson got a little richer. Every time a senior citizen was denied the physical therapy they needed, the skilled nursing care they needed, the chemotherapy they needed, Mr. Thompson got a little richer.

Mr. Thompson's chosen profession was to spend every day finding new ways to make sure he didn't have to pay for surgeries, for prescription drugs, for an extra day in the maternity ward, for a routine doctor's visit — and to make sure that you and I pay as much as he could get away with.

It's never enough for people like Mr. Thompson to simply be rich. There is no "enough." Every single day, Mr. Thompson made the same conscious decision, the same deliberate choice, again and again and again: more, more, more, more, more — there is no cost too great for others to pay in financial hardship, in suffering and in human lives.

Could you make that choice, day after day? Could you look your children in the eye and say you were spending your life doing something that mattered?

What kind of heart beats inside a man like that?

He and others like him could eliminate all the ways they've created to insert themselves between you and your doctor to make sure it's as difficult and frustrating as possible to figure out why the insurance company isn't paying for the care you need. Heck, they could even just reverse one of their morally reprehensible policies.

What a Christmas present it could have been to never have to worry about prior authorizations ever again, or for every doctor within 30 miles to be in-network, or even if the intentionally labyrinthine system of code charges were just consolidated into a predictable few so you knew what you were being charged and why.

None of them are universal constants, they were created by and for people like Mr. Thompson, people who always want more, more, more, more, more.

By design, Mr. Thompson caused unnecessary suffering and hardship every day he went to work, and he was killed on the way to a conference about how he could do it even better. The fact that he was also a beloved husband and father only makes it more sickening, revolting, infuriating that the 49 million husbands, fathers, wives and children his company insures were only numbers on a spreadsheet to him that could make him not just rich, but rich-er.

What other word is there for a man like that than evil?

But with the arrest of his suspected killer, Luigi Mangione, any possibility of any real focus on Brian Thompson, and the people like him who are still very much alive, is gone. Because it's easier — and makes for much better entertainment — to reckon with the troubled man who committed a heinous act, isn't it? So much less abstract than how Mr. Thompson spent his lifetime of inflicting suffering.

So we'll spend the next week or so dissecting more meaningless details about Mr. Mangione's background, as if we all might learn some great truth from an offhand comment he made to an acquaintance in kindergarten that could possibly explain why he would kill such a respectable man, such a family man, a man who wore quarter-zip fleeces.

Mr. Mangione's handwritten "manifesto" will almost certainly be read aloud on Fox News, and the commentator class will yell and shout about how vigilante justice isn't justice. And it isn't. Sales of Monopoly will go up as ironic stocking stuffers, hipsters will drive sales of his backpack and those who spend so much of their lives in a virtual reality will call him a hero. He isn't.

And then we'll move on, even as we continue to share in the same frustrations. And the Brian Thompsons of the world will go right on, too, with their pursuit of more, more, more, more, more, more, always pushing to find the non-existent limits to their ravenous greed.

Murder is never justice. Not for him, not for anyone. Human lives are too precious and human beings too fickle to be ended so definitively, even ones who don't believe the same about you.

The only way people like Mr. Thompson will ever see the justice they deserve, and, more importantly, see their despicable practices curbed even just a little bit, is if people like you and me do something about it.

But we both know we won't. We won't write letters, we won't make phone calls, send emails, hold elected officials accountable with our votes, even share Facebook posts or just shout from the rooftops — we won't demand that things change, even just a little bit, to make people like Brian Thompson stop bleeding us dry at our most vulnerable.

So after our friends and family have finished sharing their health insurance experiences this Christmas, ask them one more question: The only one willing to actually do something about all that turned out to be a disturbed and desperate man with a tenuous grasp on reality.

What does that say about you and me?

Geoffrey Woehlk is the news editor at the Forum.Geoffrey Woehlk is the news editor at The Forum.