Former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz stood by her comments defending the storm of shocking jokes made online about UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s assassination.
“If you have watched a loved one die because an insurance conglomerate has denied their life saving treatment as a cost cutting measure, yes, it’s natural to wish that the people who run such conglomerates would suffer the same fate,” Lorenz wrote in an article for her newsletter, User Mag.
The 50-year-old executive was fatally shot on 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 reposted an article about how Blue Cross Blue Shield will no longer cover anesthesia for the full length of some surgeries.
“And people wonder why we want these executives dead,” Lorenz wrote Thursday on BlueSky, a microblogging social media network similar to X.
The insurance agency has since backtracked the plan.
Many others joined in, celebrating Thompson’s assassination 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 the public sentiment. It is not me personally saying ‘I want these executives dead and so we should kill them.’”
Nevertheless, Lorenz continued to repost messages on X comparing Thompson to serial killers and noting the separation between “the ruling class” and “the working class.”
She argued the real story is not the sick jokes being made online, but the broken healthcare system that “led” to the outrage.
“Thousands of Americans (myself included) are fed up with our barbaric healthcare system and the people at the top who rake in millions while inflicting pain, suffering, and death on millions of innocent people,” Lorenz wrote.
Lorenz also cited examples from a swarm of infuriated social media users who recounted stories of themselves and their loved ones being denied crucial healthcare coverage by UnitedHealthcare after Thompson’s fatal shooting.
“Remembering the day United Healthcare denied a one-night hospital stay for my 12yo child as ‘medically unnecessary’ following 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 telling me, so the nurses had to tell me when I checked in at the cancer center for my next treatment,” another posted.