Murder Isn't Heroic
But caring is
I've been following the NYT's coverage of Luigi Mangione, the young man arrested for the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. This is about all the talk I can handle right now on the killing—almost immediately after early headlines emerged from the New York shooting, I realized I was going to have a major problem with the markedly gleeful social media response.
While I've been known to rag on my insurance company, and yes, I have called them EVIL, the thought of murdering anyone at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee has never crossed my mind.
It's hard to verbalize my thoughts from the few glimpses of morbid satisfaction I've encountered online, but I think the bulk of my disgust comes from the gross hypocrisy.
People are calling the vigilante “cool” and dubbing him some voice of the people who are fed up of being cheated by the American healthcare system. There's even a ton of “free Luigi” merch online.
Does anyone actually feel any more heard now that one CEO is dead?
I don't feel heard.
If anything, I probably feel less heard because so many of the people applauding the murder are the same folks who mock patients like me and tell us that it's our fault we can't afford the healthcare our insurance companies deny. They're the same people who callously judge fat people. The same people who read an article about lipedema and find it funny to publicly shame our bodies and claim we've simply got the bodies we've earned.
Insurance companies deny coverage for lipedema, lymphedema, and lipo-lymphedema patients every day. For advanced patients like myself, that means either going without care or paying hundreds of thousands of dollars out of pocket for medically necessary care insurers call cosmetic or experimental. They do it and they get away with it largely because our society has accepted several cruel ideas:
Healthcare isn't fundamental human right.
Most people get health they've worked for.
Fat bodies are the consequences of a moral failing.
We see these values (or lack thereof) reflected daily in the way we talk about our bodies, our health, and other people's bodies and health. It is still acceptable to hate fat people—just look at the comments section of any news story about Ozempic. The lack of empathy can simply gut you. As if some people get high from mocking bodies like mine and inflicting as much pain as possible.
The same thing happens to those who need to turn to crowdfunding to afford necessary healthcare. There is always a faction of folks who want to make sure those people feel worthless for publicly discussing their health and asking for help. There are always people who enjoy talking about that person and how embarrassing or how “cringe” they are to think their health is so important.
Perhaps I would feel differently if I didn't see the same people mocking fatness and lipo-lymphedema-related disability also cheering on Brian Thompson's killer, but the duplicity has hardly surprised me. Both positions take a measure of delight in human suffering.
So, I'm having a very hard time with all of the recent talk about the so-called American anger at health insurers because it feels quite shallow and navel-gazing. It doesn't seem all that authentic.
Anyone can applaud the murder of one CEO in the sea of an unethical industry that prioritizes profits over people. It's easy to delight in anyone's misfortune if they are far enough removed from our circle of loved ones. Just like it's easy to blame the rising costs of healthcare on “the obesity epidemic” without caring to know how or why a patient becomes obese.
It is easy to care only about the injustices of life that affect us directly. It is easy to look for scapegoats when we are suffering, too. It's a hell of a lot harder to care about suffering that isn't ours. It's harder still to care about people with dismissed illnesses we don't understand.
It's the hardest thing to actually give a damn and then do something about it because you genuinely care.
If the CEO killer was a hero, he certainly wasn't my hero. If he was making a statement, that message was muddled at best.
If Luigi Mangione indeed turns out to be the killer, his message gets even muddier—we're talking about a privileged and wealthy young man who attended an affluent prep school that cost nearly $40K per year. Incidentally, he's the descendant of Nicholas Bernard Mangione, a real estate manager who founded Lorien Health Services, a nursing home company with a dismal 2.5 star rating. Nicholas also operated a number of other Maryland businesses, including a radio station, country clubs, and luxury travel resorts.
Luigi is a young man with far more access to and experience with traveling for quality healthcare than most of us could ever imagine. He may have been unhappy with health insurers, and battling his own physical pain, but he is hardly on the level of most Americans.
Early reports on his identity have described a man with chronic back pain who ghosted his friends and family about six months ago, read and praised the writings of the Unabomber on social media, then suddenly emerged as Brian Thompson's smiling murderer. A man who openly gunned down the CEO as poor bystanders fled in terror. (I watched the video of the shooting on Wikipedia and it's frankly horrifying.)
I'm trying to understand exactly how that makes him a hero. Is Luigi a hero because more people are now talking about the abysmal state of American healthcare? If that's the case, shouldn't we feel disgusted that it takes a shocking vigilante murder of a very wealthy man to make more people pretend to care?
I'm not sure what type of progress we’re supposed to imagine might come from all of this. I genuinely don't believe it will do more than inspire a collectively morbid curiosity in true crime. If we don't care when we see fellow Americans suffering and creating GoFundMe campaigns for medical assistance, and we don't care about the thousands upon thousands of people struggling to afford weekly GLP-1 injections, being denied surgery or routine therapy… it's hard for me to see what tangible good this murder could do.
If we are going to talk about heroes and disparity in healthcare, then we ought to be talking about the people who actually put their money where their mouth is to help make medical care more accessible. We should be talking honestly about how many Americans suffer from having their medically necessary treatments denied by insurers every day.
Taking action to make actual change and do tangible good is heroic. Murdering a man whose position as CEO is merely a symptom of disease in our country is not brave, heroic, or admirable.
Stanning murderers is the last thing we need to be doing in a society that is all too often devoid of empathy.
Very well said. I would add that some of the people cheering on the murderer voted for candidates who were against single payer and/or the Affordable Care Act. Because you don’t deserve healthcare if you can’t pay for it.
Well said. You echo my thoughts here. Especially calling out the hypocrisy.