What Newsroom Nepo-Babies Don't Get About the UHC Scandal

The media never seemed quite so out-of-touch as they do with the general public's feelings about Luigi Mangione and American healthcare.

Luigi yelled, “It’s completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience!” — I fear he’s right.

I’mma start by saying I’m biased. I can admit it. Perhaps if my health was never an issue I’d have a hard time understanding why the masses at worst support, but at best, empathize with Luigi Mangione, the man charged with shooting Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare. But since the arrival of benign tumors on my liver at 26 and the crowdfunding campaign then (and crowdfunding campaigns since), and the insurmountable medical bills that they didn’t cover, I fall into the camp that sees a refusal to provide care due to cost or an incorrect perceived lack of need as inherently violent.

That lumpy thing is a grapefruit sized tumor on my 26-year old liver. Not great, but it’s also gone now so que sera sera. Also did you know livers grow back? It’s actually pretty cool, but anyway…

When I search for empathy for Brian Thompson I come up pretty empty. The coastal publications might think this makes me a bad person, but their empathy doesn’t extend to the clear majority of us who understand how bad American healthcare is, so what do they know?

Writers in newsrooms from The Atlantic, to The New York Times keep putting out dimwitted op-eds reducing Mangione’s violence to meaningless barbarism, failing to engage with the horrifying realities of healthcare in America. We are a sick country, and one with businesses that profit from us staying sick and dying. Couple that with the fact that healthcare is largely still tied to employment, and we have millions of people too sick to work, but somehow working, just so they can get the medical care they need, and it doesn’t take a damn rocket scientist to see why people aren’t falling over themselves sad about the killing.

It’s no wonder desperate people seek out snake oil salesmen like RFK Jr. for alternatives to medicine they can’t afford to access. I’m not saying it’s right (obviously), I’m just saying I get it. When you facilitate an environment of desperation, people will take the cheaper “solution” every time. And that might be listening to podcasts from people who are not intelligent selling an alternative to the doctor’s office. But I digress…

What you won’t see in any of these bloviating scribbles is a description of withholding care as violence. I don’t purport to love Luigi Mangione’s Goodreads ratings, but I certainly understand what would push a rich and privileged someone in chronic pain, whose mother writhed in pain nightly—to violence. The Times says he walked away from his affluence and became radicalized, but more likely, his affluence convinced him there’d be someone to save him if there was ever a problem, and what he found was that even with loads of resources, adequate healthcare is overpriced and hard to come by.

For all the thousands of words these outlets have dedicated to three bullet holes, far less has been written about Daniel Penny’s vigilante violence against a man whose only threat was a loud voice on a train. Surely we should all be more worried about the fact that Daniel Penny is currently bar-hopping in Manhattan after killing a man on video, no? Do we only reserve our ire for those who would strike down rich white men protecting company profits? If the goalposts for what qualify for violence are so mobile, how do you expect anyone to care? If the media is going to cherry-pick what qualifies as violence, and it boils down to a guy in performance fleece getting the business in midtown Manhattan by a guy wearing a backpack, of course no one is going to respect their opinions.

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I won’t go full conspiracy-theorist (it makes me tired), but some of these pieces come across as paid for by United Healthcare and their subsidiaries. During the election all these rags interviewed people eating spaghetti at midnight in diners about what they thought about a variety of issues. Now they aren’t the least bit curious about why, across the political spectrum, the race divide, the culture wars, everyone but super rich white people seem to understand on a cellular level why this came to pass? They don’t think it’s odd that they’re the only ones left scratching their heads, trying to fill in gaps that are already full?

People have had enough. People are tired of feeling like our lives don’t matter. We watch in 4K video as the ultra elite eat on the hard work of generations of people they never have to meet, while we struggle to make ends meet on our end. Most Americans are one emergency away from being homeless. If you have $600 in savings and you get hit by a car, your life might be over even if you survive the crash. That’s how real it is for most people in the richest country in the world. When the workers don’t share in those profits, the empathy gap widens.

Piece after piece has compared our current state to the Gilded Age, but we are also in something completely new. In the Gilded Age, the poor could generally ignore the wealth disparity. The quality of life differences were there, but they weren’t broadcast constantly in the faces of those starving in the streets. Now we have an internet that throws it in our faces minute-by-minute. And in this instance, it wasn’t a wealth gap that was illuminated, though United Healthcare is a huge enterprise worth nearly half a trillion dollars. That’s money that sick people have paid into it and not gotten reciprocal value. I’m not saying people should be murdered, but I am saying a lot of people have died waiting for people at that company to help them and it rarely makes a headline.

The executive editor at The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance callously reduced Mangione’s manifesto to “complaints against customer service.” She calls support for Mangione “De-civilization” as if there is anything civilized about creating bureaucratic healthcare systems. This decivilization is (in too many words) described as essentially every argument becoming zero-sum to the degree that violence seems like an increasingly acceptable response. She tries to tie a news-cycle not focusing on a successful assassination long enough, to the potential for more violence, even as she and her publication have made a 5-course meal out of this vigilante killing. Surely this example would be more apt for school shootings than a truly isolated incident. Can she spare a word for the politicians paid for by the gun lobby who make sure we don’t linger on the dead school kids before their bodies are cold? No? Just this guy?

She asserts that, “You cannot fix a violent society simply by eliminating the factors that made it deteriorate,” but doesn’t go on to suggest we try, and doesn’t provide an example in which successfully eliminating factors that made it deteriorate historically didn’t stop violence. Indeed, societies with less rampant inequality have far less crime. I haven’t asked Mangione, but I bet if healthcare in this country was equitable and of quality he probably wouldn’t have murked that guy.

Her final point is that we have to, without exception, reject anyone who would choose violence, but this falls on deaf ears when the man she wants us to reject makes good points regarding the violence of a man who implemented faulty AI to incorrectly reject a high number of insurance claims to save his company some dough since 2021. It’s really hard to reject the actions of someone who has suffered similarly, but couldn’t take it anymore. It’s nearly impossible to reject someone whose violent actions almost certainly caused a different healthcare company, Anthem, to walk-back talk of not even covering anesthesia for the duration of long surgeries (!!!!!) that very same day. Comparing him to Trump’s promise to use the power at his disposal for violence is a real stretch.

And I’m no big fan of violence, obviously. So reading out-of-touch article after out-of-touch article claiming my fascination is akin to bloodlust is just silly. If anything I think these companies and CEOs should act in a way that relieves human suffering, and in turn, that will decrease all likelihood that copycats would follow. I would certainly hope movement towards universal healthcare and healthcare not tied to employment status would decrease the likelihood of violence. Why not try it? Even if it didn’t stop random vigilante violence it might save the lives of those whose healthcare companies have let them down time and time again. If you’re against violence, be against it when it affects people with less than you.

Also newsrooms, do better. No wonder everyone is sick of reading your shit.

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