For Profit Healthcare: Why the Bourgeoisie Protects Mass-Murdering Profiteers

American citizens of all backgrounds are aware that the United States’ healthcare system is rife with inequality, needless complexity, and exorbitant expenses. What the wealthy and the bourgeoisie fail to comprehend is how the working class — who are inundated with the violence of medical debt and denied claims — would rightfully celebrate the assassination of former UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The common sentiment of citizens has been that he deserved to die for the suffering his company has inflicted on the 7.5 million people that are supposedly covered by their insurance. In addition to having the highest claim denial rate of all health insurance companies, UnitedHealthcare is currently paying $2.5 million in settlements for using artificial intelligence algorithms, knowing they had a 90% error rate, to deny care to sick patients on their Medicare Advantage plan. 

Only people who received a pre-recorded phone call between Jan. 9, 2015 and Jan. 9, 2019 from UnitedHealthcare’s Medicare team and were not a UnitedHealthcare member or third party authorized to receive these calls are eligible for a settlement payment. The onus is on the individual to file for the claim by April 15, 2025. Not only do people have to go back and search for a voicemail they may not have anymore, the electronic form link UnitedHealthcare claimed was available is currently invalid. This timeline also makes the assumption that UnitedHealthcare wasn’t using AI before January 2015 or after January 2019. However, their website contradicts this, stating the company has been using AI for over a decade, so it’s safe to assume United Healthcare owes a lot more people a lot more money for AI-denied claims.

The bourgeois media presented the elated reaction from the working class as a shocking aberration. Media anchors and conglomerates rushed to humanize Brian Thompson by emphasizing the existence of his family. His actions as the CEO, they claimed, were embedded in the role and would have been enacted by any other CEO, thus exempting him from the real harm his decisions caused and the form of retribution enacted on him by the shooter. But the bourgeoisie refuses to grasp a simple truth: when a person holds the power to dictate policies and practices that by deliberately denying life-saving and harm-reducing services — resulting in widespread suffering and death — then the consequences they face should reflect the scale of that devastation.

Friedrich Engels expressed this concept as “Social Murder” – deaths that occur within society due to social, political, or economic oppression. It’s contradictory to condemn the physical violence captured on video when Brian Thompson was killed while unabashedly justifying the social murder that occurs on a grander scale within industries like private health insurance. Just as Brian Thompson had a family, so does every person that his company denied life-saving care for, yet only his humanity is deserving of notice in the context of violence.

The accessibility of affordable healthcare is one of the biggest financial stressors haunting Americans today. This is usually presented as a fluke; the system is broken rather than inherently flawed, able to be fixed through a series of reforms ending with ‘Medicare for All.’ However, despite the promises made by politicians, few and far between, pushing for a comprehensive, single-payer insurance plan, it’s ultimately unlikely to be realized as long as the potential for profit within the healthcare industry remains, and the working class will continue to suffer as a result. Even if Medicare For All were enacted tomorrow, the program would still be beholden to capitalism and would make no promise to be more efficient or weed out the grifters trying to exploit the most vulnerable. Realistically, US politicians are in bed with so many insurance and pharmaceutical companies that they would never give up lining their pockets for the benefit of the working class, it’s too profitable. 

Healthcare in the US is a mixture of public and private systems. Medicare and Medicaid, funded by payroll taxes, premiums, and federal revenues, provide coverage alongside private health insurance companies. Many privatized plans are offered by employers as “benefits” for their employees, but the real benefit is to the employer, as private insurance companies offer the employer's lower price to sell their plans en masse. Private insurance providers are also in control of managed care organization structures that do decrease cost of care, but limit the physicians that you can visit through certain network systems. This puts further control of your health in the hands of for profit entities. In turn, the insurance company receives both direct payments from Medicare and Medicaid recipients, and tax rebates to “subsidize” this cost to consumers.  

For years, there have been many attempts to undermine and get rid of Medicare and Medicaid. In recent months, Republican Congressmen have proposed $880 billion dollars in budget cuts to the House Energy and Commerce committee that oversees Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program), and Social Security. The Trump administration continues to hide behind their mandate of “cutting waste and fraud” when very little evidence of such waste has been found. In reality, this is the same tactic employed in the era of the “welfare queen” myth perpetuated in the 1980s to excuse cuts to welfare programs that keep the most vulnerable members of our community alive under an otherwise crushing economic system. Cuts to crucial safety nets are used to incentivize the move to more expensive private insurance options, so that money can further line the pockets of CEOs, lobbyists, and politicians on both sides of the aisle whose investments are tied to privatized healthcare.

Underlying social and material conditions play a significant role in human health. These conditions, such as redlining and food deserts (which contribute to malnutrition, greater disparity for access to public services, and racist assumptions that lead to harmful bias in medicine), can cause health problems to arise or exacerbate existing ones. These issues disproportionately affect Black and Brown communities, and those suffering are left to seek assistance from the very system that oppresses them if they can’t pay for their care out-of-pocket. To ease corporate restrictions, environmental protections are rescinded, leading to pollution in our air and water that puts those with less access to proper filtration at risk of contracting diseases. 

Healthcare companies also change the components of various drugs to extend their patents, ensuring rival institutions can no longer research them and alternatives cannot be made, resulting in lower quality medicine. Struggling people may accrue debt if insurance doesn’t cover enough of the cost, while others may choose to prolong the time they go without care in order to save money to afford medical bills or wait until they can’t put off taking care of their health issues any longer. This results in even higher medical bills than originally anticipated, as more extensive damage is done to their health and more care is needed. Some of these conditions, if left untreated, become fatal. 

In essence, these corporations not only create the conditions that make us sick and decide if we live or die, but the process (and the poverty it creates) is cyclical. While we are still alive, the bourgeoisie gain through keeping us ill and dependent. The ability to access healthcare itself is a commodity to be bought and sold in the so-called “free market,” with insurance companies prioritizing the needs to accumulate further capital over the needs of the working class’s wellbeing. The wound is further deepened as public institutions rely on working class tax dollars to fund their research that frequently leads to improvements in our medical knowledge. However, this knowledge is quickly turned into profit-seeking as companies rush to patent new technologies and medicines to sell to the public. These private health insurance companies are the last group of people to have our best interests at heart when it comes to funding and providing the best medical care possible considering they make us pay an exorbitant amount of money for low-quality care.

This predatory cycle can only be ended if money is removed from the motive of care entirely. To combat the social and material contributors to poor health, the root cause of these conditions – the mechanisms of a capitalist society – must be replaced. True freedom of choice when it comes to healthcare is abolishing the systemic structures that induce and perpetuate health conditions, like pollution and dangerous working conditions. When and where the health of the people is the priority, medical research is funded because the people demand medicine and care, and those that would seek to continue profiting off the bodies of others are suppressed. 

Medicine and healthcare, from mental to physical, is a fundamental right and should be treated as such. We should utilize the playbook of the country with the best doctors and healthcare in the world. Through revolutionary socialism, Cuba has been able to implement a national healthcare system, and the country is able to provide one doctor per 150 people and assumes fiscal responsibility for all its citizens despite many decades of US embargoes and sanctions. In America, we see only one doctor for every 350 persons, and yet we are supposedly living in the most developed, free and fair nation on the planet. This is lunacy! Since the risk of severe student debt is non-existent in socialist countries, anyone who wants to become a healthcare worker is able to do so. They receive the proper training and are not subjected to the hefty price tag that applies within capitalist countries. Instead of only treating a symptom or prolonging an illness, Cuban doctors focus on preventative medicine and health inequities. Examples of this include vaccinations that treat cancer and diabetes, such as CIMAvax and Heberprot-P. 

The successes that Cuba has experienced highlight the inherent supremacy the socialist system allows. Through the democratic centralization of the systems of production and care, people become more educated, more healthy, and more politically active in their local and national communities. While Cuba continues to put these theories into practice, if they were utilized within the US context, we would have the means to provide support to the whole country, if not the world. It would be an immense undertaking in organizing the means to make this change a reality and possibly generations to then achieve it, but it can’t possibly be achieved under the current system that puts its highest priority on endless profit rather than the actual wellbeing of the people. It is up to us to stand up to these corrupt corporations and fight for the poor and working masses.