The death of Brian Thompson has bothered me more deeply than I could have anticipated. The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, administering human affairs sails perilously close to evil.  As a former administrator this writer knows exactly what she was talking about.  As I have mentioned in these postings my life was threatened over the course of my career in administration more than once.  Those threats were obviously averted, but the pain of remembering that decisions I had to make in the name of public policy caused other human beings to want me dead has stayed with me right up to the present moment.  Right now a health care  insurance administrator and CEO is dead and his family is in mourning.  The only thing I know is probably not one of those people celebrating Brian Thompson’s execution knows the actual reality of the work he did, although they may be painfully personally aware of the impact of a broken healthcare system.  Unfortunately, it is a care system that can only be modified through the vote. The vote requires good decisions with followup at the polls.

I learned in my career a decision is an honest binary subject to feedback.  Most of the time there is “yes” and there is “no” and then there are the range of grays in between yes and no that are the running stream of life.  Be it the public sector or the insurance industry we need people to responsibly with humanity say yes or no.  Otherwise the public would rise up and righteously fire us all  for their money would be sucked without restraint down that insatiable stream of the shaded gray called indecisiveness and deceit.  If every administrator were fired, or had to live in the fear of assassination, we would have no support services or health services in either the public or the private sector.  

This killing of an administrator/CEO is  tragic all around, and still a terrible crime nevertheless.  The death penalty requested by the prosecution promises, as always, to serve no purpose and in fact as we will see, will magnify the confusion of the legal and moral implications of this crime.  The death penalty, I fear, comes from us, the public, off-loading our civic micro-slice of responsibility for this crime.  I hear no “we” in all this conversation.  It is us, the citizens of this country who continually fail to provide sufficiently for one another’s health care.  Are we too “poor” as nation to do provide for one another?  No, not at all.  The Mea Culpa here belongs to all of us.  The insurance industry is by nature an industry and cannot substitute for a public health system.  Good is taking this tragedy up to the level of we.  We may have failed both the victim and the defendant in this case.  We are close to failing the health future of our culture and it is our responsibility to make it good.