They gasp, they recoil, they clutch their pearls so tightly you’d think the string would snap. A healthcare CEO is dead, and the moral outrage pours forth like a river breaking its dam. The headlines scream. The talking heads weep on cue. The condemnations rain down with the righteous fury of a choir of angels.

But let’s pause, just for a moment. Not to endorse violence — no, we’re too civilized for that — but to consider the hypocrisy of the outrage. Because when the tables were turned, when lives were lost not in boardrooms but in hospital beds, the gasps were nowhere to be found. When patients were bled dry by billing codes, crushed under the weight of unaffordable treatments, or left to wither in waiting rooms, the pearl-clutchers were silent. Their fingers didn’t tremble then. Their hearts didn’t bleed.

You see, the life of a healthcare CEO has value to them — real, tangible value. He was part of the machine. One of the gears that keeps the profits rolling, the premiums rising, and the desperate suffering. His death is a tragedy because he sat on a throne they recognize. But the patients? The ones who died quietly, without news coverage or outrage? They were just statistics. Collateral damage in the pursuit of margins and market shares.

And here’s the bitter truth: those who clutch their pearls now were more than happy to look away while lives were sacrificed on the altar of efficiency, profitability, and executive bonuses. But when the violence hits close to home, when it disrupts their comfortable narrative, then the outrage spills forth. They don’t mourn the system’s victims — they mourn the disruption of their illusion that the system works.

Their tone, their horror, their sudden sanctimony is just another performance. A carefully rehearsed act to distract you from the reality that a broken system breeds broken people. Desperation doesn’t grow in a vacuum. It festers in the shadows of denial letters, prescription costs, and hospital bills that ruin lives as efficiently as any bullet ever could.

They want you to focus on the act of violence, not the violence of the system. They want your outrage neatly contained, your sympathy directed only at those who wear suits and ties, not hospital gowns and debt chains. They want you horrified — but not too horrified. Just enough to condemn the individual act, but never enough to question the structure that produced it.

Because questioning that structure? Well, that would mean recognizing the blood on their own hands. It would mean admitting that their silence, their indifference, their polite applause for the healthcare industry’s “successes” were all part of the problem. And self-reflection, accountability — those aren’t pearls they’re willing to clutch.

No, they’ll stick to their script. The CEO is the victim. The system is sacred. The status quo must remain unchallenged. Any suggestion that desperation has a source, that rage has a cause, is brushed away as dangerous, distasteful, uncivilized. Because acknowledging the roots of the problem means they might have to pull those roots out. And that’s a job far messier than they’re willing to get their hands for.

So let them gasp. Let them clutch their pearls until their fingers turn blue. Because their outrage isn’t about justice. It’s about preserving the illusion that the system is just fine, that the real violence is the rare, shocking exception — not the daily, grinding rule.

Their pearls are more fragile than they want you to believe. And the cracks are already showing.