They don’t want to murder insurance executives.
They don’t want to murder insurance executives.
M onstrous ghouls cheering after the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City on Wednesday are ubiquitous on social media. It might be tempting to believe that they represent a silent majority of fanatical opponents of the American health insurance system. There are plenty of problems with health insurance that cause frustration and anguish for many, but when asked about their health insurance, most Americans say they like it.
The Kaiser Family Foundation Survey of Consumer Experiences with Health Insurance is a major research effort conducted in 2023 to understand how Americans think about their coverage. It found that 81 percent of insured adults rate their health insurance as “excellent” or “good.” Only 3 percent rate their health insurance as “poor.”
If greater than 3 percent of Americans can’t even be bothered to rate their insurance coverage as “poor” on a survey, it’s hard to believe there’s a significant number who believe that the murder of insurance executives is justified.
Health insurance purchased on the Obamacare marketplace is the lowest rated type of coverage, but even there, 73 percent of people say it is “excellent” or “good.” Of people with employer-sponsored insurance, 80 percent rate it positively; of people on Medicare, 91 percent rate it positively.
That’s not to say there are never problems. The survey found that 58 percent of insured adults had at least one problem of some kind with their health insurance in the past year. (That also means 42 percent of insured adults could not name a single problem with their health insurance in the past year.) The most common problem is that insurance paid for less of a bill than expected. That can result from misunderstandings on both sides. The second-most common is that an in-network doctor didn’t have appointments available, which isn’t really the insurance company’s fault.
Health insurance is a product that people interact with most when they are sick or injured or someone they love is sick or injured. Satisfaction is lower for people who say they are in worse health, but 68 percent of them still rate their insurance as “excellent” or “good.” There are plenty of reforms that could improve health insurance, but the fundamental unpleasantness of sickness and injury is not going to change and likely informs at least some of the negative sentiment toward insurers.
Insurance companies are notoriously bureaucratic and unpleasant to deal with if something goes wrong, and the labyrinth of billing codes and interaction between providers, insurers, and the government provide many opportunities for things to go wrong. That’s a problem for public policy, industry best practices, and debate, not murder, and grown adults understand that.
These results aren’t unique to this survey. A 2020 Gallup poll found that 82 percent of Americans are satisfied with the quality of care they receive, 74 percent are satisfied with their coverage, and 67 percent are satisfied with what they pay for health insurance. “The majority of Americans have consistently been satisfied with the total cost they pay for healthcare since Gallup first asked the question in 2001,” the report said.
A 2024 Pacific Research Institute survey found that 91 percent of insured adults are satisfied with their current plan. Only 6 percent of people rated their health insurance as poor or very poor, and 72 percent rated it as good or very good.
These high approval ratings for current health insurance are why Barack Obama had to lie about the effects of Obamacare by saying, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” If lots of people hated their health insurance, he would not have had to do that. And much of the law’s initial unpopularity was caused by its upsetting of people’s current health insurance, which they mostly liked then and mostly like now.
If it felt like the presidential candidates didn’t talk about health insurance very much, that’s probably because the voters didn’t care about health insurance very much. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll from September asked voters which of eight issues were most important to them, and health care costs came in sixth. Only 5 percent of voters said it was their most important issue, ranking behind the economy and inflation, “threats to democracy,” immigration, abortion, and entitlement programs. By party affiliation, 6 percent of Democrats, 7 percent of independents, and 2 percent of Republicans said health care costs were their most important issue.
The people online who are cheering for the murder of Thompson are not representative of Americans’ overall views on health insurance. Their claim to be speaking for some mass of angry insurance customers is not supported by what Americans actually say when asked about their coverage and care. They are, instead, publicly cheering for a murderer who is still at large while under the delusion that they occupy the moral high ground.