Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

What a health insurance CEO's murder reveals about America's pain

What a health insurance CEO's murder reveals about America's pain

Cancer, healthcare and support with a woman holding hands with her man in the hospital. Medicine, insurance and trust with a couple in a clinic for treatment or help before death, mourning and loss

Getty Images//Stock Photo

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 abroken 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.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

Read More

The American Schism in 2025: The New Cultural Revolution

A street vendor selling public domain Donald Trump paraphernalia and souvenirs. The souvenirs are located right across the street from the White House and taken on the afternoon of July 21, 2019 near Pennslyvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.

Getty Images, P_Wei

The American Schism in 2025: The New Cultural Revolution

A common point of bewilderment today among many of Trump’s “establishment” critics is the all too tepid response to Trump’s increasingly brazen shattering of democratic norms. True, he started this during his first term, but in his second, Trump seems to relish the weaponization of his presidency to go after his enemies and to brandish his corrupt dealings, all under the Trump banner (e.g. cyber currency, Mideast business dealings, the Boeing 747 gift from Qatar). Not only does Trump conduct himself with impunity but Fox News and other mainstream media outlets barely cover them at all. (And when left-leaning media do, the interest seems to wane quickly.)

Here may be the source of the puzzlement: the left intelligentsia continues to view and characterize MAGA as a political movement, without grasping its transcendence into a new dominant cultural order. MAGA rose as a counter-establishment partisan drive during Trump’s 2016 campaign and subsequent first administration; however, by the 2024 election, it became evident that MAGA was but the eye of a full-fledged cultural shift, in some ways akin to Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Keep ReadingShow less
The U.S. Is Rushing To Make AI Deals With Gulf Countries, But Who Will Help Keep Children Safe?

A child's hand holding an adult's hand.

Getty Images, LaylaBird

The U.S. Is Rushing To Make AI Deals With Gulf Countries, But Who Will Help Keep Children Safe?

As the United States deepens its investments in artificial intelligence (AI) partnerships abroad, it is moving fast — signing deals, building labs, and exporting tools. Recently, President Donald Trump announced sweeping AI collaborations with Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. These agreements, worth billions, are being hailed as historic moments for digital diplomacy and technological leadership.

But amid the headlines and handshakes, I keep asking the same question: where is child protection in all of this?

Keep ReadingShow less
Illinois Residents Grapple With Urban Flooding

Rear view of a person standing in the street flooded with water

Getty Images//Stock Photo

Illinois Residents Grapple With Urban Flooding

Following months of research, canvassing, and listening to community needs, journalists, including Britton Struthers-Lugo, produced solutions-based stories about the challenges faced by the Berwyn, Illinois, community.

In Part 1, Struthers-Lugo examines the issue of urban flooding, a growing concern for residents and infrastructure in Berwyn.

Keep ReadingShow less
Proposed Proof-of-Citizenship Bill Could Impact All Registered Voters in Texas

Opponents of a proof-of-citizenship bill before Texas lawmakers say many women in rural areas, who could get targeted by the bill, do not have a birth certificate matching their current last name.

Golib Tolibov/Adobe Stock AI

Proposed Proof-of-Citizenship Bill Could Impact All Registered Voters in Texas

Voting rights advocates in Texas are speaking out against a proof-of-citizenship bill before lawmakers.

Senate Bill 16 would require new registrants and some existing registered voters to prove they are U.S. citizens.

Amber Mills, issue advocacy director for the Move Texas Civic Fund, said the requirement would be in addition to what the state already does to check someone's eligibility.

"When you're completing a voter form, you do also have to submit either your driver's license number or your Social Security number," Mills pointed out. "That's really important because that is how the state verifies who you are, and that's a key indicator that they use to protect their databases on the back end."

Even if you were born in the U.S., the bill could require you to show proof of citizenship with a passport or birth certificate matching your current name. According to the Secure Democracy Foundation, more than 38% percent of rural and small-town Texans do not have a passport.

Anyone who cannot prove citizenship would be placed on a separate voter roll and could only cast ballots in the U.S. House and Senate races.

Emily French, policy director for the advocacy group Common Cause Texas, said the additional barriers could prevent many residents from casting their votes in local, state and presidential races.

"All the DPS systems, all the immigration systems which say that they are citizens, but there can still be mistakes that mark them as noncitizens and could throw them off the voter rolls until they come in with these documents that they don't have," French explained.

The bill directs the Texas Secretary of State's Office to check all registered voters' status by the end of the year and send the names of registered voters who have not proven their citizenship before September 2025 to county elections offices.

Mills noted if you are flagged, there is no online system to comply with the request and all paperwork must be submitted in person.

"We are not disputing the goal of having only eligible citizens on the voter rolls, but we know that Texas already has strong systems in place," Mills emphasized. "It's ultimately the state's responsibility, the county's responsibility to do these voter roll checks, but what SB 16 would do is not change any of that, not improve any of that. It would just add an additional burden."

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Keep ReadingShow less