Christmastime is a season of unity and peace on Earth. How fitting that this year, not even a month until Christmas, something happened which has somewhat strangely brought people together: the killing of a UnitedHealthcare CEO.

Aside from being fascinating from the true-crime aspect, the murder has captured peoples’ attention in part because a large subset of the population agrees with the killer.

Perhaps most surprisingly, though, the people who are agreeing on this subject are from all walks and political sides.

Make no mistake: we are not advocating for reckless violence, which is what this will eventually turn into through the actions of copycats. While many can agree with each other that this CEO has copious amounts of blood on his hands, the problem with vigilantism is that eventually the vigilante’s gun finds targets who are undeserving — mob rule, etc.

A few key things need to be said, however.

To quote JFK: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Everyone has an insurance story, and some particularly unlucky folks have several.

Frankly, this has been brewing for years. The legal system has failed to provide adequate recourse for many — consider the Sacklers and their role in the opioid crisis, which has been tied up in the courts for years.

No amount of angry phone calls can change the conversation — and this has only grown more dire with the adoption of AI technology which removes even the bare shreds of human compassion from the industry. Decision makers are oftentimes completely isolated from those whose decisions they impact.

Furthermore, the acceleration of wealth accumulation by the top few percent cannot be understated. Regardless of whatever other socio-political disagreements residents of Clinton County have with one another, every person in the county has more in common with one another than anyone here has in common with a random billionaire.

While “red meat” issues such as abortion and trans rights can do an effective job of dividing and distracting, that only works when people have fundamental — often religious — disagreements.

With something like health insurance, that disagreement isn’t there. Everyone knows that the system is working against us, even as we play by the rules.

Despite what some will try to argue, this is not a culture issue. This is a class issue.

We, as a nation, pay through the nose only to be denied care in the worst times of our lives, or to be left picking up the pieces with crippling medical debt in the wake of debilitating illness — to say nothing of the lives that could be saved if insurers valued preventative care and diagnostics as highly as medical experts and patients would prefer.

There are dozens of studies which support what people already feel to be true with hard facts.

One example, from this year, can be found in its entirety for free online (www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2024/sep/mirror-mirror-2024).

The study examines Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, across “70 health system performance measures in five areas: access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity and health outcomes.”

“The only clear outlier is the U.S., where health system performance is dramatically lower,” the study states, continuing that “especially concerning is the U.S. record on health outcomes, particularly in relation to how much the U.S. spends on health care.”

If you want to become more knowledgable on the subject, feel free to read this study and others, though be warned it may be upsetting.

Some amount of anger and feeling of righteousness is justified, here.

And while it is fair to wish that violence was not necessary to effect change, the sword and the gun has historically been the last recourse of the powerless.

This has happened before, and it will likely happen again.

In 1845, the term “social murder” was coined to describe how poor conditions and care were killing workers unnaturally early.

Effected primarily by those in power, a good way to think about social murder as a concept is the consequences made by the stroke of a pen as opposed to the stroke of a blade.

You can consider our own region’s blue-collar mining background — the heritage of the “red neck,” who stood in opposition to exploitative mine bosses and the legacy of the company store — or you can consider, more recently, the famous Ford Pinto incident in the 1960s-70s, where Ford executives chose not to fix a known issue that would result in the deaths of hundreds because they felt the lawsuits would cost less to resolve than fixing the problem.

The anger revealed over the last week isn’t going away.

In fact, we would posit that anger is escalating, not cooling.

The mask-off hypocrisy of this particular murder getting such a massive amount of police resources, for one, while countless murders go unsolved, does little to assuage the mood of the average citizen.

To quote George Carlin, “It’s a big club, but you ain’t in it.”