By Issues & Insights Editorial Board | December 13, 2024
The 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.
Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
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