In 2024, conservatives watched as much of the left celebrated the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a young father whose apparent crime was running a health-insurance company. To his admirers on the left, that role made him responsible for allegedly denying care, raising prices, and embodying every grievance attached to the American healthcare system. His alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, was consequently elevated by some into a folk hero.
Comedian Bill Burr was among the more prominent figures to make light of Thompson’s death, and he was rightly criticized for it. But by Wednesday, he was back at it. “Free Luigi” has become a recurring Burr punchline, and in a Wednesday interview, he criticized healthcare CEOs for hiring additional security and lowering their online profiles after Thompson’s killing. Rather than viewing a targeted killing as a reason to protect themselves, Burr argued that Thompson’s death should have served as a trigger event compelling executives to run their companies differently.
.@billburr criticizes corporations' reaction to Luigi Mangione's killing of a health care CEO:
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) September 23, 2026
“The response to the Luigi [Mangione] thing. It wasn’t ‘Maybe we need to look at what we’re doing if it makes some crazy person do this.’ [Healthcare executives’] response was to take… pic.twitter.com/1yld3qmULl
This argument is common on the left, and one I have heard, surprisingly, from some on the right as well: If the problem is so obvious and so urgent, why will health-care CEOs not simply care more about patients or lower their supposedly exorbitant prices?
The answer is that this framing mistakes a system problem for a personal-morality problem. Brian Thompson did not run UnitedHealthcare as he did because he was uniquely callous, and replacing him with virtually anyone equally competent would not have meaningfully changed the company’s incentives or pricing.
The business is structured around rules and revenue streams created by government policy, not around the goodwill of whichever executive happens to occupy the corner office. That is the broader flaw in Burr’s argument and in the familiar claim that greedy executives could lower prices if only they cared enough.
In healthcare, government intervention designed to fix the industry has instead made government the industry’s dominant customer. UnitedHealth Group reported that roughly 75 percent of its 2024 revenue came from government-related programs. Why would a company prioritize winning over individual consumers when government accounts for three-quarters of its business?
The uncomfortable conclusion is that many of healthcare’s most persistent failures are not simply the product of bad CEOs or insufficient corporate compassion. They flow from a government-built system that insulates insurers from ordinary consumer pressure, rewards dependence on public spending, and then acts surprised when executives respond to the incentives it created. Replacing Thompson would not fix that system. Neither, needless to say, would assassinating him.
The more we blame individuals, especially businesses that are simply operating by the rules of the game, the more we risk creating the kind of moral climate that surrounded Brian Thompson’s killing. When every systemic failure is reduced to the alleged greed of one executive, public anger looks for a human target rather than the policies that produced the incentives in the first place.
The real question is where the blame, and therefore the public’s ire, actually belongs. Voters understandably demand that government “do something,” but urgency does not produce good governance. Too often, that demand yields policies built around good intentions while results are treated as an inconvenient afterthought. Until people view these problems with greater clarity, the same cycle will continue: government creates the rules, businesses respond to them, and the public blames the businesses for playing along.
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