People Express Concern For The Blue Cross Blue Shield CEO After Affiliated Insurer Anthem Announces It Will Stop Covering The Full Cost Of Anesthesia For Some Surgeries
The BCBS CEO is the wrong target. But it's hard to argue with the fury placing her there.
Photoroyalty | Shutterstock As dark as the response has been to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the light it has shone on the depth of fury Americans feel toward the U.S. healthcare system is impossible to turn away from.
That justified rage has come into even sharper relief after an astonishing move from a Blue Cross Blue Shield-affiliated insurer came to light amid the uproar — one so diabolically cruel and unethical that many are speculating that BCBS's CEO may now be in danger, too.
Insurer Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield announced it will no longer cover the full cost of surgical anesthesia.
The outrage towards UnitedHealthcare stoked by Thompson's death has now spilled over to Anthem (also known as Elevance), one of several insurers in the country affiliated with Blue Cross Blue Shield, after it announced it would no longer cover the full cost of anesthesia for some surgeries in the states of Missouri, Connecticut, and New York.
Many assumed the announcement had, in fact, been made on December 4, 2024, the same day as Thompson's murder, which seems to have thrown gas on the fire of the anger surrounding the announcement itself.
People have expressed shock that Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield would be so brazen as to move forward with this announcement right after the UnitedHealthcare CEO was murdered.
That is not what actually happened, however: Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield made the announcement on November 1, 2024, to very little fanfare outside the healthcare industry, presumably because American health insurers are already so diabolically unethical in the first place that it's hard to be surprised by anything they do anymore.
Nevertheless, the change, which Anthem claims is being implemented as part of efforts to make healthcare more affordable, according to a statement supplied to CNN, is diabolical on a level that approaches the farcical evil of a mustache-twiddling cartoon villain.
And that's not just my populist anger talking. The American Society of Anesthesiologists called the decision "appalling" and "egregious" in a November statement excoriating Anthem for its "arbitrary" approach to determining how long anesthesia should be allowed to be implemented during surgery — a determination Anthem has no qualifications whatsoever to even make in the first place.
As the ASA put it, "It’s a cynical money grab by Anthem… [which] breaks the trust between Anthem and its policyholders who expect their health insurer to pay physicians for the entirety of the care they need.”
The anger the announcement has generated is unsurprising. So, too, is the combination of nonchalance and outright glee that Thompson's murder has inspired in what seems to be the majority of the general public.
When you play so fast and loose with people's healthcare — a game that results in scores of patient deaths each year (anecdotally speaking, at least, since insurance companies are allowed by state and federal law to keep statistics on these matters secret from the public) — people don't tend to be able to muster up much empathy for the people in charge.
People are now speculating that the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield may not be safe following Anthem's anesthesia decision.
As soon as Anthem's anesthesia decision began to go viral on social media in the wake of the news of Thompson's murder, platforms like X lit up with warnings and concern — mostly in ironic tones — about the safety of Blue Cross Blue Shield CEO Kim Keck.
Reporter Taylor Lorenz seemed to have kicked off the discourse after responding to a post about Anthem's decision with an identifying photo of Keck from the BCBS website.
Lorenz was quick to clarify in a follow-up post oozing with sarcasm that she hoped people engaged in "very peaceful letter-writing campaigns" to insurance company CEOs after people criticized her for what they saw as an incitement of violence toward Keck.
Blue Cross Blue Shield was not responsible for Anthem's decision on anesthesia coverage.
There's a good reason for that pushback. It's extremely important to point out that Blue Cross Blue Shield did not make the anesthesia decision. BCBS is more like a parent company that oversees several individual insurers all over the country, in this case, Anthem. That is the company that made this barbaric anesthesia decision, not BCBS or Keck.
It's a bit like going after the CEO of Ford Motor Company because the mechanic at your local Ford dealership scratched your car. That dealership is owned by some person who runs a chain of car dealerships, not some guy or gal in the C-suite of the Ford headquarters in Detroit.
Frankly, this is a distinction a reporter of Lorenz's credentials shouldn't need to be made aware of.
Regardless, while Keck is the wrong target — or at least not the "rightest" one (she's still the CEO of an entity that morally and ethically has no business even existing, after all) — the sentiment people are expressing is all too real.
A decision of this nature is not only unjust but unjustifiable. There is no reasonable basis on which to put a time limit on anesthesia and then slap patients with a bill for not wanting to wake up in the middle of surgery when they already pay you hundreds of dollars a month to cover their healthcare.
The glee with which many have greeted Thompson's murder is deeply unsettling.
Thompson was a real human being with a family, after all — and the nonchalance with which people are now joking that Keck not only may be next but deserves to be is equally as ghoulish.
But that doesn't negate the essential truth at play here: This is precisely what happens when those in charge wield their power to immiserate everyone else in ways that materially endanger their lives. And history is full of examples in which it was ultimately only violence that would finally provoke those in power to wake up and change. That's what both the American and, perhaps especially, the French Revolutions were about.
Tellingly, it seems to have done so in this case, too. The state comptroller of Connecticut announced today that Anthem had reversed its anesthesia decision for the state amid the outrage being hurled in its direction.
We can argue about morality until we're blue in the face, but the simple truth is this: You cannot expect people to care about principles when their own well-being is gleefully toyed with day after day by those in power, whether that be politicians or CEOs.
And you cannot expect people to care about the sanctity of oligarchs' lives — which is what politicians and CEOs are at this point — when those same oligarchs seem frankly jubilant about how lucrative it is to endanger the lives of the people PAYING THEM through the nose to do the opposite.
If that situation makes the powerful feel nervous and unsafe? Well, welcome to the world the rest of us have to live in, insurance company CEOs. You reap what you sow.
The good news is that, unlike the rest of us, you actually have the power and agency to change things. Now might be a good time to give that some thought.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.