I & I Editorial BoardThe hero worship for Luigi Mangione, the accused executioner of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson, is appalling to reasonable people. We understand, though, that on occasion Americans can have a legitimate grievance with their health insurance coverage. But the guilty parties are not corporate insurance executives. The culpable are the lawmakers and regulators in Washington who have hijacked the country’s health care industry.
Mangione, arrested Monday in Pennsylvania on fake ID and firearms charges, justified the slaying of health care insurance executives, which sent many on the left into spasms of delight.
“These parasites had it coming,” the new folk hero for elitists wrote in his manifesto. Sadly, Mangione, a son of privilege who favors the crumbling British government’s National Health Service, is not alone in his blind hatred for health insurance executives.
Former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, who has been publicly demonstrating her tenuous grip of reality and decency for years, has been a leader among the aggrieved. “And people wonder why we want these executives dead,” she posted on Bluesky only hours after Thompson was gunned down.
Then on Monday night on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” she said that, “along with so many other Americans,” she felt “joy, unfortunately,” at the news of Thompson’s death. She quickly tried to backtrack when she realized how malicious and deranged she sounded. But out of the abundance – or maybe the emptiness – of her heart, her mouth spoke.
On Tuesday, we noted that The Hill was reporting that “social media users have sometimes outright gloated at the killing.” Apparently it’s an acceptable expression of “populist rage.” Later in the day, the execrable Jimmy Kimmel read exchanges among his staff which demonstrated that his crew desperately needs help.
One asked if “you guys think the UnitedHealthcare CEO killer is hot?” Another said “everyone is obsessed” with Ivy Leaguer Mangione and seemed happy to report that people “are saying a NY jury has the power to find him innocent.” Other zany comments included “we all love him,” “I’m not mad at him” and “I would visit him in prison, and bake him cookies maybe.”
Other examples of this madness include:
- A University of Pennsylvania professor calling Mangione “the icon we all need and deserve.”
- Mugs, hats, holiday sweaters, wine tumblers and baseball caps “emblazoned with the phrase ‘Deny, Defend, Depose’” — words written on ammunition casings found near where Thompson was shot in midtown Manhattan — “popped up on eBay, Etsy, TikTok and Amazon,” reports the Washington Post.
- Millions have been “salivating over the alleged assassin of Brian Thompson in a disgusting display of our society’s disintegration,” according to the London Telegraph.
Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny, whose actions were justifiable, received no such adoration and were instead vilified by the left and in pop culture. Both were also acquitted by juries, and rather than stalk prey, as did Thompson’s killer, they defended themselves and others. They were just on the wrong side of identity politics, and like Thompson, from modest backgrounds, which makes them deplorables in the eyes of the elect.
The insanity has become so widespread that, says the Daily Mail, “alarming ‘wanted’ posters of top health care executives” have been “popping up across New York City,” prompting “police to issue a bulletin warning leaders of the rising threats.”
While she didn’t directly defend the shooting of Thompson, Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren did try to justify it. “People can be pushed only so far,” she told the media. “The visceral response from people across the country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the health care system.”
Warren’s lack of self-awareness is rich, because she and others who have irresponsibly created a health care system that too often malfunctions, not health insurance executives, should be the targets of complaints. As Grabien founder Tom Elliott has noted, “insurance companies simply do what” the Health and Human Services Department “tells them to.“
Sally Pipes, president and chief executive officer of the Pacific Research Institute, and a long-time health care analyst, agrees that “government is the problem for a lot of issues facing patients and their insurance coverage.”
After Obamacare passed in 2010, government exchange plans became available in January 2014, after which, says Pipes, “the life of insurers has become much more complicated and plans much more expensive because of all of the regulations, mandates, and especially the costly 10 essential health benefits that must be included in a plan.”
Rather than a hedge against medical disaster, health insurance in the U.S. has become “an inefficient form of socialized medicine, increasing costs,” says statistician Williams Briggs. The government has become a “ruler” that “steps in” and requires insurers to cover the medical care of policyholders who have pre-existing conditions. The only way they can do this is to take the losses or spread the costs among policyholders. They are not charities nor endless fonts of U.S. dollars.
What has happened through government intervention is that we now live in a nation where “health insurance programs, in both the public and the private sector,” have become so tangled that patients often find it “too bureaucratic, complex, and confusing,” says the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Moffit.
“The ‘private’ insurance sector is distorted by endless government regulations and interventions,” says our friend Steven Hayward in his Power Line Daily Chart. “Second, the dirty secret of health policy since the failure of Hillarycare in 1994 is that the government demands that private health insurance systems do cost containment, so that they, and not the government, will take the heat.”
Or in Thompson’s case, multiple bullets.
We live in a coarsened, losing-its-way society when it’s the company executive who is killed in cold blood, while congressmen continue to be reelected and regulators keep their jobs. As is the case with so much in our country, and the greater West, there is much wrong with this picture.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
I’m reminded of Thomas Sowell’s remark, “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication a n d a government bueaucracy to administer it.”
There is a reason cost plus drugs is doing so well. The medical costs in the US have nothing to do with the actual costs of delivering that service.
We have created the problem by not having an alternative that is accessible to all. Health insurance companies should not be able to deny coverage if you are paying for it, full stop. Anything else creates this type of resentment. A government run program would train doctors and nurses at much lower coats than the current system. There is no reason for doctors to be making $600k a year and that is the average salary for several types of doctors. They do this right in Europe, we need to take insurance companies out of the position of being the only choice in America.
I understand that no medical school has to pay for it’s pharmaceutical instruction, rather it’s funded by big Pharma
Stupid. So doctors are to be your indentured servants so you can realize your God given right to health care where cost is to be balanced on the hands and family incomes of doctors? Doctors in England have gone on stakes over poor pay in the past. Abd I certainly want my brain surgeon to make more that would a plumber, even in a plumber’s good year
In your anger, you completely miss the point and resort to silly hyperbole, thus you cut any value from your comment.
Insurance coverage is irrelevant if you don’t need it, similar to abortion. Therefore it’s political value is actually about the money that can be gathered in over it’s controversy protentional. But no matter how much you think you can raise to fight insurance companies, they can give more. Don’t expect any major ripples affecting the industry, this current hubbub will pass quickly.
The BUM was never covered by UNH… Lived in Hawaii and wanted for nothing. His family owned health care providing nursing homes and had their own ‘issues’. It looks like he may never have even held a job.
And who’s next? Banks? Drug companies? Lawyers, judges, politicians? Newspapers, web sites, bloggers? Teachers? Girlfriend?How about his parents?…If you ask me the person responsible?? Was Luigi Mangione. Hope he rots in jail till nobody ever remembers his name!!
It really doesn’t surprise me too much that a leftist who idolized the una-bomber would murder, after all those in the environmental movement in those years thought they were justified in putting metal in trees, in the hopes that those who those who cut down the trees would decapitate themselves.
It was only several years ago that a leftist tried to assassinate a Republican Congressman while the Congressman was playing softball.
The original Leftist-Stalin-tried and succeeded in eliminating Trotsky competition for Russian leadership-by hiring assassins to murder Trotsky by using ice picks.
Any Leftist or Progressive plot can be rationalized, hidden or justified: see the FISA warrants signed off on by the FBI; see Lawfare used against Trump; see Russian Collusion; see our 51 former intelligence agents (an oxymoron if I heard one) who lied when they accused Trump of being a Russian dupe.
What did surprise me is that this guy was successful. Not only was he successful in his policy to assassinate this unknowing father, husband and CEO-he did it by ambush. I think this was the very first time a Leftist policy has ever worked in this country.
I’m only sorry-not only that he murdered the CEO, father and husband-but that he isn’t eligible for the death penalty in NY. As far as I’m concerned they should give him the juice (or better yet, hang him), then revive him so that they can hang him again and again and again and again-ad infinitum.
I would have liked that Mangione was found to be a member of an intelligent resistance group that was intent on demonstrating in some useful way to America that for certain levels of abusive action by an industry, there is eventually a rigorous reaction, ie that powerless people actually have power, and will use it, so watch out cuz payback happens.
Such was not the case; Mangione is just a hapless delusional fruitcake.
There is no logical connection between his actions and the lousy US healthcare system for the general public. His “manifesto” was Jr High School stuff. He is probably (and ironically) mentally ill, so upon having an urge that many can empathize with but are too ethical and humane to act upon, he acts anyway, because he’s disconnected from conscience and ethics. He’d probably be murderously upset at Ferrari if his parents had bought him one for graduation and he was insulted by the cost of a tune up.
People who cheered him are almost always just talking out their keisters, which is the great American pastime, just like how Americans cheer executions but would never flip that switch themselves. So, Mangione becomes an income point for writers, & media making more of this than is necessary. And just wait for the trial. You’ll see endless important news ignored so that this loser can fill the front pages.