The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson represented a horrific and indefensible act of violence. His family deserves our deepest sympathy.
As a physician and healthcare leader, I initially declined to comment on the killing. I felt that speculating about the shooter’s intent would only sensationalize a terrible act.
Regardless of the circumstances, vigilante violence has no place in a free and just society.
But now, more than a month later, I feel compelled to address one aspect of the story that has been widely misunderstood: the public’s reaction to the news of Thompson’s murder. Specifically, why tens of thousands of individuals “liked” and “laughed” at a post on Facebook announcing the CEO’s death.
What causes someone to ‘like’ murder?
News analysts have attributed the social media response to America’s “ simmering anger ” and “ frustration ” with a broken healthcare system, pointing to rising medical costs, insurance red tape, and time-consuming prior authorization requirements as justifications.
These are all, indeed, problems and may explain some of the public's reactions. Yet these descriptions grossly understate the lived reality for most of those affected. When I speak with individuals who have lost a child, parent, or spouse because of what they perceive as an unresponsive and uncaring system, their pain is raw and intense. What they feel isn’t frustration—it’s agony.
By framing healthcare’s failures in terms of statistical measures and policy snafus, we reduce a deeply personal crisis to an intellectual exercise. And it’s this very detached, cognitive approach that has allowed our nation to disregard the emotional devastation endured by millions of patients and their families.
When journalists, healthcare leaders, and policymakers cite eye-popping statistics on healthcare expenditures, highlight exorbitant insurer profits, or deride the bloated salaries of executives, they leave out a vital part of the story. They omit the unbearable human suffering behind the numbers. And I fear that until we approach healthcare as a moral crisis—not merely an economic or political puzzle to solve—our nation will never act with the urgency required to relieve people’s profound pain.
A pain beyond reason
In Dante’s Inferno, hell is a place where suffering is eternal and the cries of the damned go unheard. For countless Americans who feel trapped in our healthcare system, that metaphor rings true. Their anguish and pleas for mercy are met with silence.
It is this sense of abandonment and powerlessness, not mere frustration, that fuels both a desperate rage and anger at a system and its leaders who appear not to care. The response isn’t one of glee—it’s a visceral reaction born of pain and unrelenting remorse.
As a clinician, I’ve seen life-destroying pain in my patients—and even within my own family. When my cousin Alan died in his twenties from a then-incuurable cancer, my aunt and uncle were powerless to save him. Their grief was profound, unrelenting, and eternal. They never recovered from the loss. But Alan’s death, heartbreaking as it was, stemmed from the limits of science at the time.
What millions of Americans endure today is different. Their loved ones die not because cures don’t exist but because the healthcare system treats them like a number. Bureaucratic inefficiencies, profit-driven delays, and systemic indifference produce avoidable tragedies.
To appreciate this depth of pain, imagine standing behind a chain-link fence, watching someone you love being tortured. You scream and plead for help, but no one listens. That is what healthcare feels like for too many Americans. And until all of us acknowledge and feel their pain, little will improve.
Curing America’s indifference
When we focus solely on cold numbers—the millions who’ve lost Medicaid coverage, the hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths each year, or the life-expectancy gap between the U.S. and other nations—we strip healthcare of its humanity.
But once we stop framing these failures as bureaucratic inefficiencies or frustrations and, instead, focus on the devastation of having to watch a loved one suffer and die needlessly, we are forced to confront a moral imperative. Either we must act with urgency and resolve the problem or admit we simply don’t care.
In the halls of Congress, lawmakers continue to weigh modest reforms to prior authorization requirements and Medicaid spending—baby steps that won’t fix a system in crisis. The truth is that without bold, transformative action, healthcare will remain unaffordable and inaccessible for millions of families whose anguish will grow. Here are three examples of the scale of transformation required:
- Reverse the obesity epidemic with a two-part strategy. Congress must tax ultra-processed, sugary foods that drive hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare costs yearly. In parallel, lawmakers should cap the manufacturer-set price of weight-loss medications like Ozempic and Wegovy to be no higher than in peer nations.
- Change clinician payments from volume to value. Current fee-for-service payment systems incentivize unnecessary tests, treatments, and procedures rather than better health outcomes. Transitioning to pay-for-value would reward healthcare providers, specifically primary care physicians, who successfully prevent chronic diseases, better manage existing conditions, and reduce complications such as heart attacks, strokes, and kidney failure.
- Empower patients and save lives with generative AI. Tools like ChatGPT can help reduce the staggering 400,000 annual deaths from misdiagnoses and 250,000 more from preventable medical errors. Integrating AI into healthcare enables at-home care, continuous disease monitoring, and personalized treatment, making medical care safer, more accessible, and more efficient.
If elected officials, payers, and regulators fail to act, they will have chosen to perpetuate the unbearable pain and suffering patients and families endure daily. They need to hear people's cries. The time for transformative action is now.
Robert Pearl, the author of “ ChatGPT, MD,” teaches at both the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.