I think you mean murderee.
Indeed. Fixed.
I can imagine main character syndrome has something to do with it, too. Easier to think your life is so valuable that just by taking up violence you can inspire others and change the word if you yourself have been largely insulated from the violence that gets done to people day after day (and yet the world keeps on spinning without much notice).
I’m reminded of an excerpt (from brief sections drawn out by the media) from the manifesto of a certain piece of shit antisemitic murderer whose name does not warrant mention. Young, stable home growing up, comfortably middle class, going to college, piano lessons as a kid, etc. He wrote of his decision to become a terroristic murderer (he meant to be a mass-shooter, but couldn’t handle a firearm for shit, which I guess is a mercy for the rest of us) by imaging a conversation with god in which he said, “Send me…” as if his life was so damn special and it was some great gift to the world for him to give it up (either dying or spending the rest of his life in prison) by becoming a would-be mass shooter (all he managed to do was kill one person who threw herself into the line of fire to save someone else—someone who actually did make a great sacrifice).
I was going to object, but a deeper dive supported your take. The National Academy of Sciences issued a report in 2011 entitled, Explaining Divergent Levels of Longevity in High-Income Countries. Just what the doctor ordered. The conclusions are interesting, and reflected in your charts.
Firstly, demographers know that it takes a lot to move the life expectancy numbers. US adventures in Vietnam don’t show up in them for example: effects are drowned out by other factors. Nonetheless, US gains in life expectancy between 1980 and 2010 were a lot lower than other OECD countries. Why?
The report focused on women 50 years and older, because that’s where the greatest divergence existed (though lesser divergences existed for both genders above and below 50 years of age). US smoking peaked in 1963-1974 and declined faster than in other OECD countries afterwards. “The damage caused by smoking was estimated to account for 78 percent of the gap in life expectancy for women and 41 percent of the gap for men between the United States and other high-income countries in 2003.” That’s worse than I thought going in.
Ok, what about health care? Emphasis added:
Finally, the panel examined whether differences in health care systems across countries might help explain the divergence in life expectancy over the past 25 years. … Certainly, the lack of universal access to health care in the United States has increased mortality and reduced life expectancy. However, this is a smaller factor above age 65 than at younger ages because of Medicare entitlements. For the main causes of death at older ages—cancer and cardiovascular disease—available indicators do not suggest that the U.S. health care system is failing to prevent deaths that would elsewhere be averted. In fact, cancer detection and survival appear better in the United States than in most other high-income countries. Survival rates following heart attack are also favorable in the United States.
AFAIK, life expectancy at birth is shaped by deaths early on (infant mortality) and later on (among 65+). The elderly have Medicare, which isn’t perfect but isn’t anywhere near as screwed up as our working age healthcare system. If we want to shine a light on US healthcare dysfunction, life expectancy isn’t the best metric.
Heck, that’s as old as the legend of Robin Hood, who was a wrongfully dispossessed noble not a peasant.
Deleted…
Pet peeve: Robin Hood being a noble is a later retcon of his story. In the original legends he was a yeoman, a lower middle class small landowner. Which makes sense, because the yeoman class were the ones who trained with the longbow; a nobleman wouldn’t know what to do with one.
I read the title. Since the moderators constantly add notices to stop certain threads from turning into gun control debates, why don’t they just make a designated gun control debate thread?
I could write a long post just about why that probably wouldn’t work, but we’re already off-topic.
Better for posters who want to discuss the gun control aspects of a particular case to create a new, linked thread anyway. Use that method that What_Exit has posted over and over. It works.
And now, back to discussing this particular assassin.
I would, since the New York Post declared that Biden did commute the dead penalty for mass murderers. /s
(In reality, IIRC, there were a couple of drug dealers that killed more than 10, so according to authorities, they do qualify as mass murderers.)
For the matter at hand, I do think that more than a dozen people are dead as a result of not having health care or being denied.by the Insurers, I would call it mass murder.
So is that hypothetical person someone who is (self)-radicalized, or mentally ill and delusional?
Was Magione bent on personal revenge even if misplaced, a wealthy radicalized political terrorist aiming on changing a system by violence, or a psychiatrically broken individual?
Are those who cheer for Mangione when mentioned on SNL’s Weekend Update, and on line, in support of a violent revolution with murders of CEOs and other bad actors whose actions and inactions in pursuit of self interest result, they believe, in some large numbers of deaths? Are they ready to be recruited to the cause? Would they be willing to at least aid and abet someone planning future targeted killings? Only of those they are sure deserve it of course.
Or because they are frustrated with their personal hassles of healthcare and see a wealthy CEO more as a cartoon character than a person?
Other?
I think he was motivated by a combination of revenge and ideology. I’m no expert on the shooter but I haven’t read anything that makes me think he was crazy and it’s far too easy to dismiss people who do things like that as crazy and mentally broken.
Were any of them the CEO of UHC?
Do you have any evidence at all that UHC "killed’ that many ?
There’s a difference between thinking “this guy deserved it, at least” and thinking a revolution bent on massacre would work out well. I’ve no sympathy for the CEO and feel a certain satisfaction at his death, and it’s understandable that people are attracted to the idea of violence when it appears that nothing else works at all. But I don’t want any more political violence in the US; more out of self interest than morality since as a practical matter I’ve never had the delusion that right makes might. Not a typo - I see no reason to think that violence leads to anything more than the people most effective at violence winning.
Honestly? If bolts of lightning were to magically vaporize every CEO who “deserved it”, I’d be surprised if more than a handful survived. It’s a job that attracts and selects for some of the worst people alive, drawn from a subculture that encourages psychopathy, greed, malice and bigotry.
But unlike magic lightning, violent revolutions don’t have a history of either restraint nor good targeting.
Rose and Valerie, screaming from the gallery, say he must go free…
So, the Death Penalty for greedy corrupt CEOs who havent even been accused of any crimes? My, most posters here are against the DP for even multiple murders.
No, he didnt deserve to be murdered. Investigated thoroughly, sure.
Seems to me that a big part of the divide on all this is that “Brian Thompson didn’t deserve to die” is sometimes getting muddied with ignorance or dismissal of often fatal flaws and injustices in the US health care system exploited for massive amounts of money for a select few.
Murder is legal for people in his position, so there’d be no point. Nor would he get the death penalty, that’s for poor people.
So, i don’t think this CEO was actually guilty of murder. I think the problems with the system predated his tenure, and were probably beyond his power to fix, even if he wanted to. But he represented a system that absolutely does kill people. And there’s no legal remedy for that.
If all the claims i saw working for insurance companies, the one that I’m still angry about was back in the 90s. AIDS was a crisis, and being infected with HIV was an ugly death sentence. It was discovered that factor 8, a blood product that hemophiliacs need to take to avoid bleeds, was commonly infected with HIV. (It was made from huge batches of blood, so much of it was infected.) It was also discovered that it was possible to “cook” the product at some stage in production in a way that deactivated the HIV virus without deactivating factor 8. So the drug companies switched to the safer process.
But there was a lot of infected factor 8 in the pipeline. And some drug company executive decided to sell it rather than destroy it.
I suppose if they’d destroyed it there would have been a short term shortage of factor. But … hemophiliacs have choices. They can be more careful not to bump themselves. They can avoid riskier activities. They can wait a little and see if they have a bleed.
Anyway, the sold the infected factor 8. Essentially all hemophiliacs who were taking factor 8 at that time caught AIDS and died. I suppose most of them had already been infected when that decision was made. But not all of them.
Anyway, i learned about this because my employer insured the drug company, and we paid a giant liability claim for as lot of those dead people.
So…
The guy who decided it would cost to much too throw away the poison they were selling got off without even a slap on the wrist. There was no legal penalty for killing all those people.
The company that benefited from the decision made a nice profit and paid nice bonuses to all its executives, probably including the one who made that decision.
My employer, an insurance company that really hadn’t done anything wrong ate an enormous liability claim. Cost of doing business.
And a lot of hemophiliacs died a horrible death.
Anyway, the cases are different in lots of ways. But those of you who don’t understand why people are celebrating this assassination are missing that there is NO LEGAL REMEDY for the pain and suffering our healthcare system creates. And that on some level, someone actually is responsible for that, and they are getting away with profiting from it.
I don’t think the guy murdered was the guiltiest by a long shot. That would probably be the politicians who make sure our system stays broken to benefit profitable companies. But the profitable companies (and doctors) who lobby against change bear some blame, too.
Yeah, this guy was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He represented the ills of the health insurance industry more than he was actually responsible for them. But that’s why people are cheering on the assassin.
And hey, Anthem pulled back on a decision that would have hurt people in the wake of the murder. Probably not a coincidence. I doubt it will lead to any serious improvement. But it sparked hope that the system might be improved.