On the Murder of Brian Thompson by Luigi Nicholas Mangione
I am currently thinking about staying off Facebook for a while until the community here has found another issue to bad-mouth. You could imagine what I am thinking of at the moment, and to be honest, I find the title of Robin Hood attached to Mr. Mangione quite appropriate, because unlike those who attached it, I have read at least the Pyle book; while I haven't read the older English ballads of Robyn Hood and his posse, the theme doesn't really change, and he fit the predicate of chaotic evil. The same applies to Mangione.
Luckily, the feuilletons have been saner than the online communities that found their new 'folk hero' in the bourgeois computer science graduate who couldn't help himself looking briefly into a camera to consequently be identified at a McDonald's. The police have later found what was called a 'manifesto' but is actually just a short handwritten note in whiche proved that he didn't understand how the healthcare system works¹ . As the above-cited Economist piece writes:
“The tricky thing is that insurers are hardly the only villains in this story. UnitedHealthcare’s net profit margin is about 6%; most insurers make less. Apple, a tech giant, by contrast, makes 25%. Insurers are forced to deny coverage in large part because the firms’ resources are limited to what patients pay in premiums, sometimes with the help of federal subsidies. Yet every other part of America’s health-care system incentivises providers to overdiagnose, overprescribe and overcharge for treatment, a lot of which is probably unnecessary. Many in-demand doctors refuse to accept insurers’ rates, leading to unexpected “out-of-network” charges. Hospitals treat pricing lists like state secrets. America’s enormous health administration costs (see chart 2) are bloated by the fact that almost any treatment can lead to a combative negotiation between insurer and provider.”
It reminds me a little of a tweet by opinion columnist Noah Smith has written years ago: Kroger's has a revenue margin of about two percent. After the failed merger with Albertsons², the image hardly looks better. I think that, distorted by news about CEOs' supposed bonuses, they believe that they must be making outstanding revenue high in the three-digit billions, as if they were the Feds and printed money endlessly. Reality often looks different from what one wishes to believe, or believes to be reality. ("Facts", as the online jargon went) There are CEOs who do pay themselves too many bonuses, especially in times of crises (as a German, the first thing that came to mind were Deutsche Bahn CEO Richard von Lutz, who only this year decided to stop that inappropriate tradition as the railway operator managed to exceed at trains' delays for continuous years³), but those are the exception, not the default case. We could call such decision-making immoral, but it, to initiate the red thread of this post, does not constitute a sound basis for a murder. Many on the internet have shown complacency or glee over the murder of Brian Thompson, former CEO of UnitedHealthcare, some of which have been customers of his health insurance company. (to which Luigi Nicholas Mangione did not belong⁴.) One could perceive it as part of a greater scheme: That the US healthcare system were inherently corrupted, and Thompson therefore functioned as a pawn in the game. If we assumed that to be an applicable motif, it only showed the audience's moral degeneration (If you looked for a pit of such people, see the link in this footnote⁵). Therefore, we won't. Instead, let's assume that he contributed to the corruption of the system. I have written myself on a blog post that the privatisation of healthcare couldn't work because healthcare, as a social service, did not naturally create revenue that could keep it afloat. (Oliver Bender (2022), pp. 584-586.⁶) But I didn't promote the murder of those who benefited from the system by running their own corporations therein. Technically, it is not even economically viable to keep the system as it is as it may be to blame in part on the continuing shrinking life expectancy⁷, although US-Americans have got themselves to blame too, given a lack of exercise and a bad diet too, both well-known co-morbidities. The latter, associated with malnutrition, also affects lower-class folks the most⁸, which again dispended them of parts of their responsibility for their generally lower life expectancy⁹. Returning to the general matter-of-fact, even some more serious observers have agreed witth the public sentiment that the system is broken, and that therefore, UnitedHealthcare is a victim because it had to work in a system where it could only win if assimilated itself¹⁰. We could of course exclaim that one must exit the system and instead reform oneself to become a moral vanguard. An honourable prerequisite, needless to say, but also bound to fail if it tried to expand to a national, or even international, lodestar. There is no revenue in capping costs and bearing all expenses oneself so that deductibles remained at a record minimum; everything just to make healthcare more affordable. It could morph a formerly record-making company to a pro-bono salvation service in the tradition of Mother Theresa. There is a good chance that it could work on a community level, e.g., in a destitute neighbourhood riddled with youth unemployment and drug abuse--it would also argue my major blog posts' theme of recommunalisation (Rekommunalisierung) for betterment--, but we all know that this is nothing but a pipe dream, also because many medicaments are patented. There are arguments that revoking patent rights to boost mass production of drugs¹¹, but a couple of years later, a rebuttal arrived that has made a different case; one that I shared more agreements with. One quote stood out of them all:
“We should ease up on the DPA and invest more in the supply chain–let’s get CureVac and the Serum Institute what they need. We should work like hell to find a substitute for Chilean tree bark. See my piece in Science co-authored with Michael Kremer et. al. for more ideas. (Note also that these ideas are better at dealing with current supply constraints and they also increase the incentive to produce future vaccines, unlike shortsighted patent abrogation.)”
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| no human authorship, CCTV at HI New York City Hostel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
It is technically another affirmation of the state as an investor: Instead of lifting patent rights, the government is recommended to throw money at the producers to boost their output. UnitedHealthcare was part of the Medicaid programme, thus already involved with the government, still people complained about battles against their healthcare provider because they didn't receive drugs they needed to relieve chronic pain, inter alia. (Or prosthates, &c.)
Which leads us to our next point: Criminal liability. In comments to post on my feed by people I am befriended with here on FB that implicitly or explicitly condoned Thompson's murder or at least showed a "He had it coming" mentality (which you could also say about people who provoked police officers during traffic or sporadic controls) that instead of murdering someone like him, they could also assemble with like-minded (would be, perceived and actual) victims of healthcare providers like him and initiate a class-action lawsuit. Some people did that, as we can read in the news¹³, but now that the defendant has died, we are never going to learn what the courts will rule. There were good chances that the plaintiffs could have won, given that courts earlier ruled in favour of their likes in cases against Purdue Pharma¹⁴, even though the pharmaceutical industry can be opined to not benefit from the healthcare system previously deemed corrupted, perhaps beyond disrepair ¹⁵.
I have argued earlier in a blog post when the first assassination attempts against president-elect Donald J. Trump took place¹⁶, that there could be good reason to murder him if we considered it from an historical and philosophical standpoint. The problem is that Trump's example cannot be compared to Thompson's for one important reason: The lack of coercion. A national president is elected by a majority but not by everyone when we speak of a Democracy, where no unanimity is required when picking a ruler for the next tenure. A company's president, on the other hand, does not force themselves onto someone, especially when one is not a customer of said company. There are hundreds of thousands of companies with which one has got nothing to do and one will never encounter anyhow, neither through subordinate clerks, nor personally. He will thus not have an influence into one's life. In Mangione's case, this works particularly well because he, supposedly, acted on behalf of "the people", i.e. those affected by UnitedHealthcare, rather than for his own good. But there is one aspect that we can derive from my blog post on tyrannicides: The futility of such singular cases. What would have happened if one of the would-be Trump assassins had succeeded? The next in charge would have taken his place; in his case, J. D. Vance. The same is likely going to happen in Thompson's case: He too is going to be succeeded by his vice president if no other turns are chosen by the board of supervisors. (So far, no information are available either as a press release or in shape of investor relations) I often described it as a head of a hydra: If one head is cut off, it will regrow like the tail of a lizard. One needs to pierce through them with a spear or another thick stick with a sharp tip, as Kratos did it in God of War while shipping through the Aegean Sea. This precedence is going to have one thing to happen soon: Reinforced security measurements for incumbent CEOs and bosses¹⁷, creating costs that will inevitably handed down to the customers. So-to-say, Mangione has stomped down on the people, rather than helping them cope easier with their deductibles. The Fortune magazine¹⁸ rumours that future business leaders may be disincentivised from taking over leadership roles because in addition to the existing pressure in such roles, a constant threat to oneself or one's family--although it hasn't been addressed yet (at least in a viral tweet), Mangione left a traumatised family behind, including children who will now have to grow up without a father. I don't believe that many of those who either cheered or expressed glee over his premature death genuinely agreed with the Biblical idiom of "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" (Matthew 5:38), but rather with what followed thereafter, in line 39: "But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also."--existed now as well. One could only imagine how imminen that threat now is, given the singularity. It is likely going to remain the only case, also because CEOs are now going to have bodyguards around them all the time while in office.
As a final word, we should remind those who hope for a healthcare utopia or any betterment through blunt force like murder as a means of blackmail, that they are going to fail inevitably¹⁹. This is not how it works, just as Bernie Sanders has failed on his endeavour of achieving this goal through firebrand speeches. Secondly, cheers from both the far left and far right for Mangione has shown once again that the horseshoe theory, while condemned especially by the former side of the aisle, has once again been proven to be correct sometimes²⁰. We can have serious discussions about what is going wrong in the US healthcare system, and more often than not do that. But murder is no means to reforming healthcare, and it is only going to further manifest existing positions. It can hardly be understood as a symptom of what a corrupted healthcare system drives the people to, especially when one shows to not have undestood how the system works, beyond what one couldn't understand from the outside. He failed already on that level.
One cannot rationally support Mangione, at least not uncritically, as it happens abundantly on the internet now. Otherwise, one maxim that I have also expressed explicitly in my tyrannicide blog post still stands: Murder is bad.
Fußnoten
¹ https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/12/12/luigi-mangiones-manifesto-reveals-his-hatred-of-insurance-companies
² https://www.albertsonscompanies.com/newsroom/press-releases/news-details/2024/Albertsons-Files-Lawsuit-Against-Kroger-for-Breach-of-Merger-Agreement/default.aspx
³ https://www.rnd.de/wirtschaft/deutsche-bahn-keine-boni-fuer-den-vorstand-aber-ein-beigeschmack-AX7MCK6GHVF4PLZ66I5YTXE4O4.html
⁴ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/unitedhealth-group-ceo-andrew-witty-says-healthcare-system-is-flawed-2024-12-13/
⁵ https://www.facebook.com/unitedhealthgroup/posts/pfbid0MEW7qnvRPXX3dd1e4gRvYyaBScjWimRJzEnkp3jXAwCPHdFK2jbQehjT4jMmtNTbl
⁶ https://politique-rationale.blogspot.com/2022/11/capitalism-anarchism.html#more
⁷ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/accounting-for-the-widening-mortality-gap-between-american-adults-with-and-without-a-ba/
⁸ https://t.me/LanguageLiteratureCulture/6574
⁹ Hoebel, J., Nowossadeck, E., Michalski, N. et al. Sozioökonomische Deprivation und vorzeitige Sterblichkeit in Deutschland 1998–2021. Bundesgesundheitsbl (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00103-024-03862-0
¹⁰ https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/05/united-healthcare-ceo-brian-thompson-murder-medical-system-policy/
¹¹ https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/waiving-ip
¹² https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/05/ip-is-not-the-constraint.html
¹³ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/12/06/unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian-thompson-threats-court-battles
¹⁴ https://www.ft.com/content/9f94d55b-0656-4234-adf5-7a76b3730fc0 ; later, the Supreme Court has come to Purdue's rescue, blocking earlier rulings that could have led to payouts to the plaintiffs: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/06/27/purdue-pharma-supreme-court-opioid-bankruptcy/
¹⁵ https://www.economist.com/business/2023/10/08/who-profits-most-from-americas-baffling-health-care-system
¹⁶ https://politique-rationale.blogspot.com/2024/08/Sic-Semper-Tyrannis.html#more
¹⁷ https://www.irmagazine.com/investor-perspectives/why-brian-thompsons-killing-has-prompted-companies-think-about-executive
¹⁸ https://fortune.com/2024/12/09/united-healthcare-ceo-brian-thompson-security-executive-recruiters/
¹⁹ https://reason.com/2024/12/11/the-people-cheering-brian-thompsons-murder-cant-have-the-medical-utopia-that-they-want/
²⁰ https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/very-un-american-response-to-the-murder-of-brian-thompson
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