Health Karma

I have a health insurance policy managed by UnitedHealthcare, and for reasons too random and complicated to explain, I was already planning to leave the company and go with another provider before last Wednesday, when United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated by a disgruntled customer.

While I do not condone violence, I can understand why Thompson was killed, as his company has expanded exponentially over the years and has produced enormous profits by denying payment of claims at double the industry average, causing many policy holders to die from not being able to receive treatment or go broke from health care bills.  As many as 68,000 Americans die annually from being unable to receive care or being unable to pay for care.

So for Brian Thompson to be shot to death for making lots of money for a company that made a killing off people dying is karma in the truest sense of the word.

The suspect - and likely killer - is a fellow named Luigi Mangione (no relation to jazz musician Chuck Mangione), who apparently had a problem with UnitedHealthcare due to an injury to his spine.  He more or less apologized for making Thompson's kids fatherless (Thompson was separated from his wife), but said the shooting had to be done.

"Frankly," he wrote in a manifesto, "these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the U.S. has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. "United is the [expletive deleted] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but [h]as our life expectancy?  No, the reality is, these [expletive deleted] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it."

Progressives who have been striving for decades for the United States to adopt a single-payer health care system like Great Britain or Canada had been cheering on Mangione, and many people - including progressives - refused to help law enforcement on the manhunt for him, even though Mangione got his frustrations out with . . . a gun.  The biggest irony as that he's a far-right libertarian.

Karma biting back.

Meanwhile, radio host Stephanie Miller can't stop riffing off Luigi Mangione's name, pronouncing it in the most ridiculous Italian accent on her radio show, which only serves to remind me that Italian-Americans - I'm half-Italian - are the last white ethnic group you can make fun of.

Especially if you're a progressive.

And meanwhile, America's god-awful health care "system" goes on.