Former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz stood by her comments defending the barrage of shocking jokes online about the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
“If you’ve seen a loved one die because an insurance conglomerate denied them life-saving treatment as a cost-cutting measure, yes, it’s natural to want the people who run such conglomerates to suffer the same fate, Lorenz wrote in an article. for its newsletter, User Mag.
The 50-year-old executive was shot dead Wednesday in Midtown Manhattan outside the Hilton Hotel in what appeared to be a targeted attack, leaving behind two sons, according to police.
But some social media users were quick to applaud the killing, including Lorenz, who retweeted an article about how Blue Cross Blue Shield will no longer cover anesthesia for the length of some surgeries.
“And people wonder why we want these leaders dead,” Lorenz wrote Thursday on BlueSky, an X-like microblogging social media network.
The insurance agency has since withdrawn the plan.
Many others joined in, celebrating Thompson’s killing as payback for UnitedHealthcare’s refusal to cover certain medical procedures for their loved ones.
Lorenz said her post was not meant as a call to arms: “My post uses a collective ‘we’ and is explaining public sentiment. It’s not me personally saying ‘I want these leaders to die and so we have to kill them'”.
However, Lorenz continued to repost messages on X comparing Thompson to serial killers and pointing out the divide between the “ruling class” and the “working class”.
She argued that the real story is not the sick jokes being made online, but the broken health care system that “led” to the outrage.
“Thousands of Americans (myself included) are fed up with our barbaric health care system and the people at the top who collect millions while causing pain, suffering and death to millions of innocent people,” Lorenz wrote.
Lorenz also cited examples from scores of angry social media users who recounted stories of themselves and their loved ones being denied essential health care coverage by UnitedHealthcare after Thompson’s fatal shooting.
“Remembering the day United Healthcare denied my 12-year-old an overnight hospital stay as ‘medically unnecessary’ after ASD heart repair surgery,” one user wrote.
“Today I’m thinking about the time United Healthcare suddenly decided to stop paying for my chemotherapy and didn’t bother to tell me, so the nurses had to tell me when I checked into the cancer center for my next treatment,” posted another. . .
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