In an alternate reality where the show was built around Carrot Top, Jonah Hill, and Lena Dunham.
Stranger
Agreed, we need to reform the health care system, lest CEOs be placed under undue risk. For now, my sympathy is out of network.
According to the analysis, AvMed and UnitedHealthcare tied for the highest denial rate, with both companies denying about a third of in-network claims for plans sold on the Marketplace in 2023, respectively.
Other insurance companies with the highest claim denial rates included Sendero Health Plans (28%), Molina Healthcare (26%) and Community First Health Plans (26%).
Additionally, the analysis found the denial rates for other major insurance companies, including Anthem (23%), Medica (23%) and Aetna (22%).
As for Luigi, I think he should be punished for his crimes: he should spend over a decade in prison and will spend over 2 decades in prison. Idolization should be judged on a case by case basis.
Obviously nobody should be gunning people down vigilante-style in the street and Luigi should be, and will be, punished. At the same time, as someone who has dealt with the US heath care system for major issues for decades, I can’t really bring myself to care all that much about the CEO he shot.
Intellectually I am well aware that murder is bad. But emotionally I haven’t lost any sleep over this one. I suspect that a lot of folk feel the same.
The successful terrorist is rebranded the freedom fighter, is all.
Yes. Absolutely. We are long past the point where anything BUT killing is going to fix anything. He is a hero and frankly the fact that there have been no copycats is disappointing.
Real heroes are people who get up every day and work for the principles they believe to better the lives of others in even against tremendous odds or skepticism about their chances of success, often with no expectation of recognition or reward. Teachers, medical personnel, rescue first responders, soldiers, social workers, politicians, et cetera can all be heroes for standing up for their beliefs and inspiring others to do the same.
Luigi Mangione shot an unarmed, unaware man in the back, and then scuttled away like the criminal he was. You might think Brian Thompson deserved death for the pain and suffering he inflicted on customers of UnitedHealthcare but that doesn’t make Mangione a hero in any way, nor did it effect any real change in UHC or the medical insurance industry at large. There hasn’t been a mass of copycat attacks because most people are not cold-blooded murderers even when faced with someone who has committed grave acts of harm.
Stranger
Luigi put fear into the minds of those kill-thousands-to-make-billions CEOs in a way that nothing else ever did.
They just took down their public profiles, hired more security, and passed the costs onto their customers. If that is what heroism looks like to the general public no wonder we’re in such trouble as a society.
Stranger
And some heroes kill people who needed killin’. Ask the residents of Skidmore, MO.
I don’t think Mangione is a hero. I do hope that killing CEOs and billionaires replaces shooting up schools as the violent-act-of-last-resort for those so furious at society that they feel they must lash out.
Yeah I bet James Earl Ray though he was a hero too. Vigilante justice and lynching are very slippery slopes Mr 3 arrows.
If we had a functioning justice system we wouldn’t need vigilante justice. As it is…
(Gestures at Kyle Rittenhouse and Enrique Tarrio)
A phrase often said . . . just before a lynching.
What we have is a system where actual lynchings go unpunished or pardoned by corrupt politicians, while it’s perfectly legal for billionaires to condemn thousands of people to die by letting a computer deny them the healthcare they paid for.
But do go on about how the courts who were unable to hold Trump accountable for his crimes are going to protect us from more Brian Thompsons.
Annnd so much for ‘But the SCotUS will stop Trump’!
Also, I can’t go on the courts since I never started about the courts.
So if the courts can’t help us, neither party thinks there’s a problem, and vigilantism is always wrong, I suppose we should just sit down and wait for death, then?
Aren’t you the poster who said you would not have helped a runaway slave in the 1800s because it was against the law to do so, and laws are sacrosanct and must be obeyed without question?
Yet murder is ok?
Yes I was. Eleven years ago. You may have noticed that the world has changed a bit since then.
Defending the weak from the strong is not murder.
See, the problem we run up against here is that Mangione has been charged with terrorism. He committed a “terrorist act”. This means that looking at the motivating factors and other issues external to the act are off the table. All that matters now is terrorism, argh.
Preventing other, similar terrorist acts is the most important thing more security for executive types. Laws that make it crime to look at them sideways. There can be no exploration into why this happened, because, terrorism.
In that respect, Mangione has made the situation worse. By having this classified as terrorism, the authorities are allowed to ignore everything outside the act and the ongoing threat.
Get a load of what Mark Twain had to say about insurance executives. Taken from a speech he gave on the occasion of his 70th birthday.
I have lived a severely moral life. But it would be a mistake for other people to try that, or for me to recommend it. Very few would succeed: you have to have a perfectly colossal stock of morals; and you can’t get them on a margin; you have to have the whole thing, and put them in your box. Morals are an acquirement – like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis – no man is born with them. I wasn’t myself, I started poor. I hadn’t a single moral. There is hardly a man in this house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that – the world before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral. I can remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape, the weather, the – I can remember how everything looked. It was an old moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn’t fit, anyway. But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World’s Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive. When I got that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing,because she hadn’t any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all. Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her – ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was – I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad to get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet high, and they think she’s a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They believe it will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match.