Dai­ly Show Sug­gests Just About Every­one Is a Sus­pect in Health­care CEO Mur­der Case

While some jour­nal­ists call for the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion after Unit­ed­Health­care CEO Bri­an Thomp­son was mur­dered, The Dai­ly Show’s Ron­ny Chieng quipped on Com­e­dy Cen­tral on Thurs­day that just about every­one is a sus­pect because every­one in Amer­i­ca hates their health­care plan and has a gun.

Chieng recalled how the sus­pect engraved cer­tain words into the bul­lets used to kill Thomp­son, “And now they’re try­ing to inter­pret what ‘Deny, defend, and depose’ means. And it looks like it’s either a crit­i­cism of the health insur­ance indus­try, or this guy was just try­ing to solve the Wor­dle on his bul­lets. Hon­est­ly, I think all bul­lets should say stuff on them. I mean, how else are we going to get Amer­i­cans to read again, right? You should load up a machine gun with A Tale of Two Cities writ­ten in it. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’”

“Deny, defend, and depose” is almost cer­tain­ly a play on a 2010 anti-insur­ance indus­try book by Jay Fein­man enti­tled Delay, Deny, Defend that claims insur­ance com­pa­nies “have an incen­tive to chis­el their cus­tomers in order to increase prof­its.”

As for who the sus­pect might be, Chieng declared, “Now the cops just need to nar­row down their list of sus­pects to any­one in Amer­i­ca who hates their health­care plan and has access to guns. Should be solved in no time.”

A 2023 sur­vey from the Kaiser Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion found that 81 per­cent of Amer­i­cans rate their insur­ance rat­ing as either “good” or “excel­lent,” includ­ing 80 per­cent of those who get their insur­ance through their employ­er. A 2024 study from the Pacif­ic Research Insti­tute found 91 per­cent of Amer­i­cans are sat­is­fied with their plan.

Amer­i­cans sim­ply aren’t eager to do away with pri­vate health insur­ance. Mean­while, gov­ern­ment-run health care agen­cies deny health­care cov­er­age too. In Amer­i­ca, we have Medicare, but inter­na­tion­al­ly the Cana­di­an sys­tem has a doc­tor short­age while the Brits ration care all the time in the name of sav­ing mon­ey.

Here is a tran­script for the Decem­ber 5 show:

Com­e­dy Cen­tral The Dai­ly Show

12/5/2024

11:04 PM ET

RONNY CHIENG: Would you train a mouse to write to write on it with some kind of mouse cray­on? I mean, who gives a [bleep] how he wrote it! It’s not impor­tant how he wrote it, what’s impor­tant is that he wrote it. 

Okay, this guy knows that there are so many bul­let cas­ings on the streets of New York, and he want­ed to make sure we knew which ones were his, right? And now, yeah, I don’t know if we should be applaud­ing that. 

And now they’re try­ing to inter­pret what “Deny, defend, and depose” means. And it looks like it’s either a crit­i­cism of the health insur­ance indus­try, or this guy was just try­ing to solve the Wor­dle on his bul­lets. Hon­est­ly, I think all bul­lets should say stuff on them. I mean, how else are we going to get Amer­i­cans to read again, right? 

You should load up a machine gun with A Tale of Two Cities writ­ten in it. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

But now the cops just need to nar­row down their list of sus­pects to any­one in Amer­i­ca who hates their health­care plan and has access to guns. Should be solved in no time.