The people who like to tell us how we should think, the New York Times types, opine to us that White working class voters support Donald Trump because they’re tired of being lorded over by the ruling class. The viral reaction to the recent murder of a healthcare CEO from a wide swath of America, not just the White working class Trump voters, but including progressives and people who generally prefer root canals to talking politics, feels like it might come from the same place.
The alleged shooter, Luigi Mangione, 26, of Towson, Md., is being hailed by many as being just short of a hero, in the wake of the Dec. 4 murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, who was shot multiple times as he headed to an early-morning investors meeting in midtown Manhattan.
“Certainly, there’s a lot to be said about fixing our healthcare industry. But this is just not the way. And elevating somebody who did something like this is certainly not the way. This man had a family. There are people suffering as a result of this,” said Jim Acosta, a 1993 JMU grad with his own daily news show on CNN, who we can see here identifies more with the CEO class, and not the literal tens of millions of people who have themselves been screwed over by big-money healthcare, or know somebody who has been, or is in the process of being screwed over.
Count me among that latter group.
My childhood best friend, for one, is currently in the UVA Hospital fighting for his life, waiting for a heart transplant, and in addition to fighting for his life, waiting for a heart transplant, he’s having to deal with daily phone calls from debt collectors, despite having Cadillac health insurance.
And then, as a kid, I saw an aunt and uncle, again, with Cadillac health insurance, have to go through financial hardship after their daughter suffered debilitating brain injuries in a car accident, the fallout from years of having to deal with it all leading to their divorce.
You no doubt have a story like this of your own, either affecting you personally, or someone close to you.
And while, no, these stories don’t justify shooting a CEO in the back, leaving his two children without a father, they do explain the anger – 100 million people in the U.S., 41.2 percent of all American adults, carry significant medical debt, according to an analysis by Kaiser Health News and NPR, and medical debt is the primary reason behind 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies.
“Watching my father decide to basically refuse care and commit suicide instead of watching health insurance companies pick his bones dry while he was still alive is something I’ll never forget,” Beau Forte, a former Green Party candidate for Congress in New Jersey, on social media.
A similar sentiment was expressed on social media by Columbia University professor Anthony Zenkus.
“Today, we mourn the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down … wait, I’m sorry, today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires,” Zenkus wrote.
To that point, we have the report of a U.S. Senate committee that concluded earlier this year that three major companies, including UnitedHealthcare, which brought in $281 billion in revenue last year, are intentionally denying claims from patients to increase profits.
At the least, we can see that this story is complicated, and gets even more so when you factor in that the shooter, Luigi Mangione, is an Ivy League grad who is the grandson of a multimillionaire real-estate developer, and whose parents are themselves wealthy business owners.
The story that is developing around Luigi Mangione is his own frustrations with the healthcare system stemming from lifelong issues with chronic pain associated with a back injury, though it’s not clear at this stage how that relates to UnitedHealth.
What we might be seeing here is, even the well-off are starting to say, with respect to our broken healthcare system, Enough!
It might not be long before that sentiment extends to how we’re lorded over by the billionaire class in general.
Just sayin’.
Video: Stunning reaction to murder of healthcare CEO
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Chris Graham
