I agree. The case has become a referendum on the profit based healthcare system and Capitalism as a whole. Whether or not anything substantial will come from it is another matter.
New York State doesn’t have the death penalty.
He is obviously not guilty of murder as his job is not illegal. That doesn’t mean he is not responsible for thousands of deaths and that he didn’t deserve to die. Luigi is guilty of murder, he is still not the bad guy in this situation.
Sounds like we might need a “CEOs and moral culpability in their company’s actions” thread.
Wait, did Law and Order lie to me?!
And so far, not a cite that shows even one.
I will certainly agree with the. The worst major US health insurance company.
Cite?
Yeah, i watched an old L&O epi with McCoy doing everything he could- even giving immunity to several other criminals- just to get the DP for one perp. McCoy was pretty much a vindictive asshole.
The DP was abolished in NY in 2004.
Well, he’s a bad guy. Maybe not the worst, but you really, really, really don’t want a society where 26-year-olds with guns decide who should die.
Right. 26-year-olds with guns should only be deciding who lives and dies if the government gives them a badge and tells them to shoot first and come up with an excuse later.
I’m actually really, REALLY against violence, as well, so no, I don’t agree that “26-year-olds with guns should only be deciding who lives and dies if the government gives them a badge and tells them to shoot first and come up with an excuse later.” I don’t know whether you meant military or police, but in all cases my personal (but unpopular) opinion is that we know a lot about nonviolent and violent but nonlethal ways of de-escalating conflict, and I’m in favour of those. There’s no place in my world for people with guns, really.
Obviously, the status quo of reality isn’t quite with me on this, either.
That is detestable. The DP is more vile than murder because it has broader negative impacts across society.
Which good as it stands, but Mangione is also facing federal terrorism charges that do carry a possible DP. How the Feds expect to convince a jury to convict on that is difficult to imagine.
How would changing the venue benefit the defendant? Healthcare CEO’s are reviled pretty much throughout the country. Support for the killer likewise seems pretty consistent across the country.
No, it doesn’t.
That’s why Federal charges are being brought. Because for all that Luigi has a cheering section there are other people who want him dead as an example and discouragement to copycats.
I think he will successfully plead not guilty by way of insanity, but if not then it is hard for me to see how not convicting on that charge. His manifesto and target unrelated to any personal harm to him establishes the motivation as a killing of a public figure in order to strike fear/terror in others as a means of causing social change by that intimidation. Something swaths of our public, and to various degrees some members of this board endorse and why he is getting the support he gets. That pretty much is the definition.
The FBI defines terrorism as the unlawful use or threatened use of violence committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.
The news indirectly called to mind the many quiet deaths profit-driven health care has enabled. According to the Lancet, profit-driven health care causes 68,000 preventable deaths in the United States annually. While profiting $6 billion a quarter, UnitedHealthcare has used tactics like artificial intelligence and prior authorizations to automatically deny and delay life-saving care and send millions of Americans into debt.
There’s more than enough coverage of the assassination itself. What does lack reporting is why it took the murder of a CEO for mainstream media to finally, inadvertently, make the health care crisis front-page news. While I think some of the comments have gone too far in their celebration of murder, I’m less interested in morally assessing them than explaining them. Their volume makes clear the degree of public sentiment against the health insurance industry, something many of us have been screaming into the void for so long.
Why haven’t deaths from denied claims and insulin rationing been given the same amount of attention as this particular assassination? One reason is that patient deaths aren’t usually as visceral as sidewalk murder. There’s also the fact that lobbying power in Washington prevents Congress from not only passing universal health care — in the only developed nation that lacks it — but even seriously discussing the possibility, which has the effect of shielding the private insurance industry from scrutiny.
Now remember: I was going for just a dozen people dead to launch such an accusation to the deniers of universal health care in the US, Health insurance groups are part of the groups that continuously work to allow more that 40,000 deaths a year to be the status quo.
As one poster in X said:
“Those that made Bernie Sanders impossible, made Luigi Mangione inevitable.”
I read that Lancet article, paying attention to how they came up the 68,000 number.
First, it doesn’t really have to do with the insurers being for-profit, but with lives that would be saved by universal coverage. If the Sanders plan was contracted out by HHS to a for profit company – which might be the quickest and most practical way to ramp it up – their numbers would come out the same.
The biggest mistake, I think, is to assume the only reason the uninsured have a higher mortality rate is that they are uninsured. This is preposterous. The insured and uninsured surely have differences relevant to mortality other than being uninsured. What differences are there between the two groups in education? In income? In marriage rate? These all have big correlations with age-adjusted mortality, and the utter failure of the authors to control by any such factors should have resulted in peer review sending back the article for more work.
Also, the 68,000 number, if you believe it, is based on a big shift of medical services from older to younger Americans. They fail to offset the younger lives saved against the lives over 65 who will be lost due to people like me having to wait in longer lines for their health care.
I favor reducing the costs of often futile health care during what is likely to be the final year of life, even though some number of added deaths there will occur. Bernie, if he got his way, would, by Lancet-type reasoning, then be responsible for many deaths among our senior citizens. This isn’t an exaggeration. Since they do not offset lives lost by lives saved, Bernie would be a killer.
I dislike the Sanders plan. And I favor forcing for-profit health care insurers to mutualize (or otherwise become non-profit). But there would not be the least justification for assassinating single-payer executives making inevitable difficult decisions in allocating scarce health care resources.
Which doesnt say how many UHC caused. Nor Health Insurance plans in general. Just that America would save lives with a real Health plan that covered every American, paid for by taxes. No duh. We all know that. Yeah, the uninsured sometimes die due to having no health plan.
Bernie Sanders health plan, misnamed “Medicare for all” (since it had nothing whatsoever to do with medicare) was outrageous and unworkable.
Yeap, that is apples vs oranges
Same here, but I am in favor of real Medicare for everyone.
So, you have shown that having real Universal health insurance for all would save lives. We all know that. I like the idea, the USA should have one. When I was a City Commissioner I pushed for free Urgent care for the homeless. We did get some of the “Doc in the box” places to give out some vouchers.
They do. Especially income. At least in the US. I’ve wondered how similar that is to other countries.
Like I said, many made it to be impossible, so then other things will come not to the liking of many that opposed Universal Access.
BTW, it is a nice racket to declare that we can’t id how many deaths UHC caused, no duh, other the efforts by groups like UHC are one reason why research is lacking in that department, so, one has to infer.
And you should have noticed that, no, the number of people they leave to die is not just the number of people they deny care, it is all others that have no care because it comes as a result of the perverse money influence UHC and others have to prevent the implementation of Universal Access to Care.
So Unitedhealth had a 14% share of the market in 2022, 14% of 60,000 dead is 8400 . And remember, that is per year.
So, yeah. We can repeat to each other that that type of mass murder is legal, it should not be.
Yep, at least we know the homeless suffer from health problems.
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, people living in shelters are more than twice as likely to have a disability compared to the general population. On a given night in 2023, 31 percent of the homeless population reported having a serious mental illness, 24 percent conditions related to chronic substance abuse, and nearly 11,000 people had HIV/AIDS.
Conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and HIV/AIDS are found at high rates among the homeless population, sometimes three to six times higher than that of the general population.
People who have mental health and substance use disorders and who are homeless are more likely to have immediate, life-threatening physical illnesses and live in dangerous conditions. Also, more than 10 percent of people who seek substance abuse or mental health treatment in our public health system are homeless.
And there are likely somewhere between 700000 and a million (if not more) homeless in the USA. Likely more. That alone would account for a higher mortality rate.
So, that is how you are blaming Thompson for mass murders. You claim he opposed Universal Health care. Note that group includes just about every Republican politician.
That is such a stretch even Mr Fantastic couldn’t do it.
That is not how the math works.
Oh and UHC political contributions?
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/unitedhealth-group/summary?id=D000000348
Largest donation was to…Kamala Harris= $774,019 .
Thomson himself was not politically active, donating a mere $577,
So, you idea that UHC or Thompson caused the death of Universal health Care in America seems pretty bogus.
It is not a stretch, it is what is happening now.
Nice straw man, that is not how logic works. You don’t like that even if we are generous and use other levels, there are still a lot of people who die with the current status, and Insurance companies like UnitedHealth are a big factor. I did mention Bernie Sanders for a reason, I was not reaching for the ineffective Democratic leadership.
This does not address the question of how much difference there is in mortality by income in other countries.