The reaction to the assassination of of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has been, I must say, completely fascinating.

Let’s start with the obvious. We shouldn’t be assassinating anyone here in the United States. 

But, people have had such bad experiences with being unfairly denied by health insurance companies that many people reacted like he deserved it.

And maybe he did.

UnitedHealthcare has been particularly nasty in denying people reflexively and unreasonably, leading people to suffer needlessly and in some cases die, that in some instances it does feel like murder.

Francis Ford Coppola directed a whole film about this phenomenon, 1997’s “The Rainmaker,” based on a John Grisham novel.

The film, by the way, is really, really good.

The media has been wondering about the “motivation” of the shooter, but I think it’s as obvious as the nose on your face: some relative of the shooter died as a result of an unreasonable insurance denial, and the shooter decided to take revenge in a way that he could.

I mean, the bullets had “delay,” “deny” and “depose” scratched into their casings. How much more obvious could it be?

They’ll find this guy eventually — although, they still haven’t found the guy who left two pipe bombs outside the DNC and RNC headquarters on January 6th, or, for that matter, the person who leaked the advance copy of the Dobbs decision at the Supreme Court — and when they do, you can be assured that he was an incensed about an insurance denial that happened to him or his family.

If I were the CEO of anything these days — like a company that shipped jobs to Mexico or that has been letting people go in favor of robots or artificial intelligence systems — I might be looking over my shoulder a little bit.