>While it’s true that UnitedHealthcare has the highest denial rate for medical claims, the CEO doesn’t set the approval rate of a health insurance company’s payouts — that’s done by the actuaries, who themselves are constrained by various considerations, such as the need to keep costs low, including for policyholders.
By this logic, what can Brian Thompson be said to be responsible for? It's very strange to me to assign more responsibility for a companies denial rates to its actuaries than the actuaries' bosses bosses boss. So why exactly does UHC have higher denial rates than other companies? It just happens to be that it's actuaries are more frugal? This explanation doesn't hold water and I think it's a strange response to the shooting of a CEO to say, well actually CEOs aren't responsible for the things their corporations do. Of course they are, now they aren't solely responsible, but they probably have more responsibility than any other single individual. It can be completely true that killing Brian Thompson was wrong AND that he was no saint, being responsible for (and getting rich off of) large amounts of human misery inflicted on UHC policy holders by the organization he headed.