The jokes circulating online about the assassination of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO are understandable — and revealing.

A good litmus test for how much fun you have at a party looks like this: When Dick Cheney got a heart transplant in 2012, did you choose the new, good heart or the broken old one?

It’s similar to the question asked in November 2023 – which also happened on Spotify Wrapped Day; There must have been something in the water when war criminal Henry Kissinger died at the age of 100. Was it rude to laugh and sneer at the end of a human life? What if this human life itself was responsible for millions of other deaths? I’ll probably live a lot shorter than Kissinger, and I never bombed Cambodia, so can’t I just enjoy my stupid memes?

The hand-wringing began again Wednesday after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed by an unknown assailant in midtown Manhattan. He went to the hotel where his company’s annual investor conference would be held. We immediately learned that authorities believed it was a “targeted” attack, and it was soon reported that the bullets used to shoot him had the words engraved on them delay And put down. This seems to indicate a “delay, deny, cancel” approach used by American health insurance companies. It’s a philosophy that has made companies like UnitedHealthcare incredibly rich while the rest of us are frustrated, underserved, and saddled with debt.

Countless questions remain unanswered: Who was the shooter? Why did he do it? Why did he stop at Starbucks before? Was Is this a targeted attack? Should other healthcare CEOs who made $10.2 million last year worry about being killed? Is the shooter hot? The answers will come in due time, but the most immediate reaction to this literal murder being committed in daylight comes in the form of… some of the funniest jokes I’ve ever seen on the internet.

In just one day, there were jokes online about Thompson being booted from the network, jokes about whether he received unchallenged medical treatment when he arrived at the hospital, and a whole lot of quasi-gloating glee. Jokes about Thompson’s death are so common that Know Your Meme has already provided you with a full breakdown of all the gags and memes associated with it. Although the deaths of other businessmen or CEOs might elicit at least a few half-hearted condolences, the public consensus on Thompson’s death is fat twitch.

Meanwhile, details continue to emerge about the cruelty of UnitedHealth’s policies. Last year it was reported that the company used faulty AI to deny elderly patients the medical care they needed. In February 2023, ProPublica published an investigation into how UnitedHealthcare tried to deny coverage to chronically ill patients. Thompson himself was recently accused of insider trading as part of a DOJ investigation. According to his wife, Thompson had received threats over “lack of reporting.” UnitedHealthcare reported revenue of $281 billion and profit of $16 billion last year.

So there’s not much funny about this story or this company when you think about it. But! We laugh anyway, like when Kissinger died, or Jerry Falwell, or even the Queen. Thompson, like everyone before him who was responsible for human suffering, was not a figure worth mourning. Murder is hardly advisable –Please don’t deport me, I’m not an advocate of murder– but Thompson’s job was located in the most predatory, cruel and vitriolic parts of capitalism. He wasn’t just some CEO of a private company happened make billions of dollars; The policies he approves at UnitedHealthcare are inevitably and directly responsible for whether people receive health insurance coverage and whether they survive their illnesses. The more money he made for himself and his company—that is, the more necessary coverage UnitedHealthcare denied—the more people got sick and died. It may be irritating that someone planned an attack on Thompson, but it’s not the least bit surprising that the rest of us laugh ruefully about it. What do you expect? Silent sadness?

People online (or offline) don’t make these jokes because they’re cowards or because they don’t see the value in someone’s life; In fact, the opposite is true. On the same day that Thompson was killed, Blue Cross Blue Shield announced that it would place a time limit on the cost of anesthesia—silly of me: I thought you were generally unconscious during the entire operation. How many people will be unable to receive life-saving or life-changing care because of such punitive policies? Healthcare companies make many deaths completely unnecessary; Only in America is access to survival so costly and so complicated by bureaucracy and indifference.

But as always, there are some concerns about whether joking about death is too macabre, even for our uniquely macabre national moment. It is a particularly American ideal that something can be morally wrong (e.g. denying people health insurance simply because they don’t have $20,000 to spare) and at the same time be infrastructurally right. There is muted sympathy for Thompson and even outright cheering at times because he worked in an industry that relied on the absence of empathy. This is something that people across party lines seem to agree on: Nobody wants to call Cigna to argue about a claim. No one should have to choose between paying off debt and surviving, and while UnitedHealthcare’s form of cruel indifference is legal, that doesn’t make it justifiable. No one wants the man who killed Thompson, and no one wants more chaos. But there is perhaps an acknowledgment that chaos might be what we need. The system is inherently broken; it cannot be reformed. It would require something radical – and most people are ready for something radical to happen when it comes to access to health care.

On the same day Thompson was killed, two kindergarten students were injured at a small Christian school in California. The children survived, but even dead children like the ones from Sandy Hook don’t move us much when it comes to gun control. The current figure of how many have been killed in Palestine by Israeli attacks is just over 45,000. Death is a surprisingly common life event. It’s both expected and shocking. Everyone has to do it. The rest of us are always forced to witness it. The very best you can hope for is a death that is quick but late, painless but meaningful, and that you leave behind a memory that serves as an example to others. But guns aren’t the only way people die, or even the most brutal way – sometimes it just is Paperwork.

Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.