The brazen murder of Brian Thompson exposed an uncomfortable truth about the U.S. health care system.

When you are the chief executive of the largest health insurer in the United States, your assassination is both a crime story and finance story. The crime-focused coverage of the murder of UnitedHealthcare boss Brian Thompson has been as splashy as you’d expect for a brazen killing that gives way to a multiday manhunt through New York. The finance-focused coverage, on the other hand, is almost unbelievably routine.

“Thompson was shot and killed Wednesday morning in Manhattan in what New York police are describing as a possible targeted attack, according to multiple news reports,” read one of those dispatches, which anyone could’ve seen in their Fidelity account or Bloomberg Terminal. It went on: “UnitedHealth (UNH.NaE) shares were rising 0.6%.”

Or there was this headline: “Top Midday Stories: UnitedHealthcare CEO Fatally Shot in Manhattan; Salesforce Tops Q3 Revenue Expectations.”

Wednesday, the day of the assassination, was a routine day for the stock of UnitedHealth Group Inc., the insurer’s parent company. The stock opened at $611.02 and closed at $610.79, an almost perfectly flat performance even though Thompson’s death preceded the market opening by a few hours. For much of the day, the stock was up by about a point. Thursday was a much worse day, as UnitedHealth lost 5.2 percent of its value, a bloodbath on a flat day for the S&P 500. Thompson’s murder is the most obvious cause for that drop, but not necessarily in and of itself. (If that were the case, the stock wouldn’t have been flat for an entire day.)

A day passed, and UnitedHealthcare got all sorts of negative publicity for predatory business practices, everything from a million mean social media jokes to stories in the New York Times. Companies across the health care sector feared for their own executive teams, and UnitedHealthcare removed its remaining C-suite’s photographs from its website. As the hours stacked up, the murder became a wider story. The stock was down again as the story remained at the national forefront on Friday morning, and there’s no telling when the downward pressure might ebb.

Even so, the stock’s doing fine with even a minor zoom out. It closed higher on Thursday than on Nov. 19, a week after the Justice Department sued the company to block its ongoing acquisition of a home health business.

Many companies lean hard on their CEOs to instill investor confidence. The company with the biggest market share of American private health insurance is evidently not one of them. We learned this week that the enterprise of making a buck off American sickness does not depend on who sits in the big chair.

The site of Thompson’s murder is an important part of the story. He was attending UnitedHealthcare’s parent company UnitedHealth Group’s investment conference, an occasion for which the parent company released some financial information. It was a good report, too, with UnitedHealth projecting 2025 sales of between $450 billion and $455 billion. That beat analysts’ consensus estimates a paltry $431 billion. The insurance division Thompson oversaw is the parent company’s biggest, but UnitedHealth also has a health care tech business.

UnitedHealthcare sure is a juggernaut, though. It made $16.4 billion in profit last year with Thompson at the helm. Every health insurance company denies claims, and the company does not share data on how many claims it denies. Devastating stories abound, though. ProPublica reported last year on the absurd trouble the company went to so it could deny a claim to a chronically ill man who had all sorts of very coverable medical problems. A Senate committee says UnitedHealthcare systematically denies solid Medicare Advantage claims to pad its margins and does so with the help of artificial intelligence.

Which, well, no shit! The goal of the insurance business is to collect more in premiums than you pay out in claims. UnitedHealth, which reported collecting $290 billion in premiums in 2023 while spending $240 billion on actual medical costs for its customers, can add and subtract.

That the market did not immediately punish the health care company on the day of Thompson’s murder might tell us something about this method of making money. Specifically, it might say that UnitedHealthcare has a robust system in place to extract a lot of money from the American health care system—and that system does not depend on the visionary mind of any one executive. This manner of profiting from failing human health is so tried and true, so nicely systematized, that even the savage and very public murder of the man in charge can only nudge the stock on the day it occurs. Even the next day, as the stock falls hard, it doesn’t fall any lower than it was a couple of turbulent weeks ago.

UnitedHealthcare is not alone in this position. A group of academics found in 2016 that it’s not uncommon for stocks to go up after the sudden death of a CEO. Sometimes the market expresses its lack of faith in a dead CEO by boosting the stock after their passing.

One can imagine a lot of businesses, though, where this perceived interchangeability of the man in charge would not carry. Bob Iger’s succession problems have been an on-again, off-again drag on Disney’s stock price for years, even though children are no less addicted to the Magic Kingdom than they were generations ago. If Elon Musk were to drop dead tomorrow, the damage to Tesla’s share price would be unfathomable, because companies and also dumb crypto tokens get much more valuable when Musk breathes on them. Granted, Thompson was just in charge of the biggest part of UnitedHealth, not the whole thing. But you did not see UnitedHealth’s board (which Thompson sat on) going to battle with a Delaware court this week to try to get him billions of dollars he does not need.

As my colleague Nitish Pahwa wrote this week for Slate, Thompson’s slaying is the latest illustration of an extraordinary disconnect between stock movements and how people perceive the business world around them. That things could be so normal for UnitedHealth on Wall Street after this murder was odd, sure. But if that was weird, then it was also weird when UnitedHealth’s share price doubled over the past five years despite a mountain of negative publicity around countless people’s awful experiences dealing with the insurer.

A Wall Street–to–Main Street disconnect is not new, but people’s uncoupling of stocks and “the economy” as a living organism has accelerated post-pandemic. A reviled but hugely successful health insurance company having a boring Wednesday on the stock market while its CEO is slaughtered and much of the internet dances on his grave is quite a depiction of this change. Whoever replaces Thompson over the long term will be tasked with making sure this balancing act continues to hold. The mood around UnitedHealthcare’s stock can be nothing like someone’s mood about their health insurer.