Eliyahu Gasson | opinions editor

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead in the early morning on Dec. 4 outside his hotel in Manhattan. The suspected shooter, Luigi Mangione, was arrested Monday in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after a McDonald’s employee reported him to 911.

The online reaction to Thompson’s murder was mostly positive. A Facebook post from the company memorializing his death was met with mockery.

“Unfortunately, thoughts and prayers are out-of-network,” a Facebook user commented.

“The current ratio of laugh reacts to sympathetic reacts on United Health’s post about the assassination of their CEO are 77k laugh to 6k sympathetic, and it keeps trending worse. The American People, however they vote, are fed up with the BS corporate private healthcare system,” another user wrote.

The online reaction to Thompson’s murder has put corporations on edge. CVS Health, the owner of Aetna, began pulling pictures of their executives from their website. Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield said a day after Thompson was killed that they would not be going ahead with their plan to limit reimbursements for anesthesia during surgery and medical procedures.

Anthem BCBS announced the plan for Connecticut, New York and Missouri to take effect in February. The policy would have set a limit to how much anesthesia the company would cover.

It seems a majority of people who are truly saddened and scared over Thompson’s assassination are his fellow corporate executives and upper-class academics at highfalutin institutions — people who are just as close to being on the chopping block as Thompson was.

What’s most striking about the reactions to his death is the apparent lack of partisanship. It doesn’t seem to matter how users lean politically. The line comes down pretty clearly on class.

“In some dark corners, this killer is being hailed as a hero. Hear me on this: He is no hero,” said Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro at a news conference following Mangione’s arraignment.

Jeffrey Sonnefeld and Steven Tian, faculty at Yale University, published an article in Yale Insights condemning the online celebrations, calling them “un-American.”

But for some of the roughly 100 million Americans who are saddled with medical debt or one of the 1 in 7 Americans who have their claims denied, according to a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation, knowing the head of one of the largest health care companies bit the bullet is a cathartic feeling.

Thompson’s death and the reaction to it says something serious about the class divide in America. The gap between large corporations, which keep getting larger, and working-class people, who keep getting poorer, is coming to a breaking point.

Across the world, democratically elected administrations are being voted out in favor of more populist alternatives who know how to speak to the people who feel like they are being taken advantage of by large, perceivably impenetrable companies. Their concerns are not unfounded.

Many industries have grown more concentrated, according to an article in Chicago Booth Review.

“… since the 1930s, the share of companies (when sorted by assets) has increased to 90 percent, up from 70 percent. Meanwhile, the asset share of the top 0.1 percent of companies has risen to 88 percent, up from 47 percent,” according to the article.

The concentration of corporate power has meant companies are less compelled to appeal to consumers, giving them less incentive to supply quality goods and service to their customers at a reasonable price.

The power that consumers had over corporations to “vote with their wallet” has subsequently meant less and less over the years. Don’t like how Walmart treats its employees? Well, if it’s the only retailer in your community, you have no choice but to support them. Don’t like the ingredients McDonald’s uses in their food? Well, where else are you going to eat out if that’s all you can afford? Not happy with your health care provider denying your claim? Your options are awfully limited, and there’s a pretty solid chance the alternative won’t be much better.

All this while prices keep inflating. American’s wages have stagnated since the 1970s despite worker productivity growing three times more than pay, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

As the article from Yale Insights pointed out, Americans generally do not resent businesses and the prosperity their successes have created. Americans are fascinated by successful people and their businesses, with the caveat that said businesses didn’t become successful by cheating the system and abusing their customers.

Killing people is bad, obviously. But the jubilant reactions to Thompson’s death and the embrace of Mangione as a hero online serve as a warning that Americans are realizing that many of the companies that they interact with on a daily basis are dishonest, have cheated in one way or another and will continue to cheat more and more as they keep eating up their competition.

The solution to the problem lies at the feet of companies like UnitedHealthcare, who have been dubiously denying claims for their customers for years, putting them in deeper and deeper debt.

The system we have in this country depends on a balance between businesses and consumers — the working class and the capitalist class — and when that balance shifts too far in favor of the capitalists, workers get angry.