Murder by Numbers
Our politicians are so worthless, the entire nation is cheering an assassin.
Every time I start writing about Luigi Mangione, I get distracted by numbers.
Mangione (although I confess to calling him Luigi; we are on a first name basis in my head) is the suspect in the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
I want to write about how I feel, my uneasiness, and how we might make this tragedy have meaning.
And it is a tragedy. Our politicians are so worthless, the entire nation is cheering an assassin. And a twenty-six-year-old—he’s younger than both my stepsons, so it’s hard not to think of him as a kid—is looking at a lifetime in prison.
However you may feel about Brian Thompson, he has a family. He has children who are now fatherless. I think of them, too.
But not as often as I think of Luigi.
When immigrant children were being kept in cages during the Trump administration, I wanted to do something.
I thought about traveling down to Washington and handcuffing myself to the gate of the White House with a big sign. I’d be arrested. Eventually, I’d be bailed out.
Then I’d go back.
“It’s useless to do it,” more than one person said.
Maybe. But at least I could say today that I did something.
I start to write about the confusion I have roiling around inside me, and instead delve into the mathematics of healthcare and health insurance. I become a wonk.
There are my own numbers—a $10,000 co-pay for a same day knee surgery in 2016—and there are the average numbers of what we Americans pay for healthcare. It’s a deep rabbit hole.
That’s just the financial aspect. I know a person who would be dead without the ACA. Because she has a rare illness, she couldn’t get insured without it; insurers would deny her due to a preexisting condition.
It might be a needless exercise to get into numbers. The reason this murder is like no other in our nation’s history is simple: almost all of us have virtually the same experience with our health insurance providers.
We are the losers, every time.
I have not encountered a single person online who’s openly criticized Luigi. Instead, I hear gratitude for someone who allegedly shot a person in the back, in cold blood.
The top CEOs of health insurance corporations average bonuses of around 20 million a year. There’s a single reason why they “earn” so much from our suffering:
Because they can. Our politicians are working in their interest, not ours.
From The New York Times:
Earlier this year, a Senate committee investigated Medicare Advantage plans denying nursing care to patients who were recovering from falls and strokes. It concluded that three major companies — UnitedHealthcare, Humana and CVS, which owns Aetna — were intentionally denying claims for this expensive care to increase profits.
If the Senate knows about it, why aren’t they stopping it? If Congress is aware of our collective despair, why isn’t their priority crafting legislation which puts an end to this nonsense? How is it possible we still don’t have healthcare for all?
Perhaps the answer lies in the over $22 million dollars health insurance companies contribute to PACS of both parties.
What good is a “scathing report” if these practices are legal?
I tell you one thing. If I could get a $20 million dollar bonus after a scathing report, I wouldn’t be too worried about the report.
The first photo that showed part of his face was shocking.
He’s smoking hot. And that smile. That beautiful, easy smile. So confident. So kind. I pegged him as late thirties, maybe forty.
He knows exactly what he’s doing, I thought.
The next photo I saw was of him in a cab, right after he allegedly shot Brian Thompson.
In this one, he looked much younger. His eyes looked haunted, full of what he’d just done. I could no longer hold onto my fantasy that he was at peace with his actions. I saw the fear.
I was chatting with someone this morning who used the word that’s been on my brain since it happened: catalyst.
I would like Brian Thompson’s death not to be in vain. I would like his death to be the catalyst for the change we desperately need in our nation.
We’d have to work together for it to happen. All of us. Because if there’s one issue which can unite Democratic and Republican voters, it’s the state of our healthcare system.
If you get a cancer diagnosis in the United States, you can expect to pay on average over $50,000 for your initial treatment. If the cancer kills you, I hope you have $250,000 in the bank for the last year of your life.
I find these numbers dubiously low. I know someone whose cancer treatment last year cost over a million dollars. The figures do not include travel expenses, time lost at work, and the countless other details that add up so quickly.
Hiring basic level, 24-hour care for my mother last year (not nursing care) cost over $25K a month. That’s $300,000 a year, not including medical expenses. This was slightly above the median cost in our nation at just over $21,000 a month.
How many people do you know with a spare quarter million in the bank not just for a rainy day, but an illness? How many people do you know with several million stowed away for end-of-life care?
The numbers seem impossible. They’re real. This is what it costs not to be sick, but to be old.
In the United States, citizens are being squeezed between two corporate entities: corporate healthcare, under which 78% of doctors are now employed; and the health insurance industry, which makes its money not from paying claims, but denying them.
There is a truth, a certainty, when one is pinned between these giants:
This system is not for our benefit.
The next logical question is,
Why on earth do we accept it?
I remember the exact moment I realized violence might not be such a bad idea.
It was right after the murder of George Floyd. All over social media, white people I knew were pleading for calm, quoting Dr. King and Ghandi in desperate pleas to accept the unacceptable in a non-violent manner.
The protests after Floyd’s death by BLM were overwhelmingly non-violent ones. But the few that included violence terrified people.
My gut reaction was different. I genuinely felt like the country might need to burn to the ground if we were to change. If a white police officer could kill a Black man on the street in broad daylight, violence might be the only language people in Washington could understand.
Let it burn, I thought. All of it. If everything I own and love must be destroyed so this never happens again, so be it.
I talked to Secret Service about my thoughts. He’s a student of American history, and as I’ve boasted reads more books than anyone I know. He inhales non-fiction.
He said very simply,
“Revolutions are bloody.”
Yes. They are.
From the reaction to this crime, I think it’s safe to say Washington might have figured out how furious we are.
But how can we make this a catalyst for change when we just elected someone who spent his first term trying to repeal the ACA? When his vice-president, JD Vance, wants to deregulate health insurance companies?
If you are in the top 1% of concentrated wealth and can set aside a small fortune in case you get a bad diagnosis, that’s one thing. But if you aren’t, and voted for Trump, you did so against your own interests.
Politicians can lie. Numbers do not.
When he was on the run, it was easier to make up stories about him.
He was on my mind constantly. I texted with someone, saying I was certain he must be out of the country by now. Everything he did was so well-planned.
Was he in Mexico, Brazil, Germany, Canada?
No.
My fantasy was shattered when he was arrested eating at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.
I think he wanted to be caught. He could have ordered his food to go.
Repeat after me: Citizens United is the problem.
As my late mother Bettie succinctly said about the Supreme Court decision,
“Corporations are not people.”
Therefore, corporations are not entitled to free speech. The Supreme Court decided otherwise, thus sealing our fate.
Citizens United has enabled corporations to buy politicians, and unless we get corporate money out of politics, we’re screwed. If they need corporate money to get elected, their priority will never be their constituents.
Corporate money in politics means corporate health insurance money in politics.
You think we’ve got a shot at healthcare for all with Citizens United?
Years ago, when someone brought up socialized medicine, there was one huge argument against it:
Choice.
You don’t want to give up your choice in doctors, do you? And what about the wait? People have to wait months for operations in places like England.
An example of a long wait might be someone I know who got a bad biopsy result this year. A specialist was recommended. The earliest appointment she could get was four months out. This did not happen in England, but in the United States.
According to a recent study, the average appointment for a GP here is three weeks, two to ten times longer than Europe.
Let’s knock it off with the “waiting times” portion of this argument.
As for choice, the American worker has none. We are subject to our employer’s choice of health insurance providers. I had mine changed twice in one year under my husband’s plan and had to find a different PCP each time it changed.
My husband and I are not the working poor. We are the working upper middle class, and we spent $1,500 a month on COBRA while he was unemployed for a year, during which he had no income.
There may have been a time when Americans had choices in healthcare, but for almost all of us, those choices are long gone. They ended with The HMO Act of 1973, under President Nixon.
There has been a lot of misinformation about the act posted online. But here’s an important point, according to Politifact:
Specifically, the 1973 act made HMOs exempt from state laws that kept medical decisions in the hands of doctors. As a result, the medical practice was subject to more corporate influence.
“Corporate influence” means corporate health insurance companies, not doctors, began to decide what kind of treatment you and I get.
What did my mother say?
“Corporations are not people.”
Nor are they doctors.
Republicans are distracting voters with who might be using your bathroom. Meanwhile, you continue to get screwed and vote for the people screwing you.
Democrats seem more likely to get us Medicare for All. It was Barack Obama who brought us the ACA. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.
But Democrats are not above taking money from these health insurance corporations.
There is no feasible, rational argument against socialized medicine. We are the only developed nation in the world without it, and we spend more per person on healthcare than any nation in the world.
If socialism scares you, I hope you never have to call the police, fire department, or send your kid to public school. I assume you’ll be rejecting your Social Security payments and Medicare when you turn 65 as well.
Look at the numbers.
I meant to write about how confusing this has felt. How I’m uneasy celebrating anyone’s murder. How conflicted I felt in the beginning when the news broke. How I was wishing Luigi safely out of the country. I imagined him on a beach somewhere having a beer, hair dyed blond, reading about himself in the paper.
I don’t know how they’ll find a jury to convict him, but I suspect they eventually will.
I’m usually more comfortable with dichotomy. I’m usually at home in the moral gray zone. But everything about this case tugs at me. Everything.
As uncomfortable as I am, revolutions are bloody. We needed a revolutionary to help us.
I read his manifesto. We have a shared fury. But only he did something about it.
In the end, I think it’s why he’s cheered so broadly. He did something. He took an action.
Like so many of us—perhaps virtually all of us—I’ve felt so powerless against these huge conglomerates controlling how my treatments go. The nameless, black void of corporate America decides first whether I need surgery or not. Not my doctor and me.
It’s terrifying and debilitating.
If we want this to mean something, we need to email our Representatives in Washington and tell them their inaction has brought us exactly to this moment: cheering an assassin after of a lifetime of fighting corporate giants.
They probably won’t do anything. But at least we can say we did something.
Here in Aotearoa/New Zealand we have a socialized healthcare system. Presently I have 2 close friends that have been diagnosed with severe cancers. Neither of them has paid anything for the process of detection or the treatment they will be enduring in the coming weeks and months. However, in a private system perhaps the diagnoses would have happened sooner. Another friend has been in the hospital for 2 months while being treated and recovering from mouth cancer. At least he doesn't have to worry about how he will pay for it. We also have a system that treats accidents (any kind of accident) differently. All treatment is paid and you are paid 80% of your income while you recover. Suing is not a big thing here.
America spends it's money on wars, military bases around the world, and trying desperately to maintain it's image as the only super power, but it can't provide healthcare for the entire population. Do you see the connection?
Brilliant. I feel all of this.