Americans for Assassination

We now have a better idea of why a masked gunman murdered United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a New York street last week.

We suspect that it was a targeted hit and that the motivation involved the way health insurance companies do or do not pay for medical care.

Now that Luigi Mangione has been captured and accused, we remark that he comes from the fever swamps of the American left. Ivy league graduate; climate change activist; anti-capitalist-- as the French would say, tout pour plaire.

For now we are more concerned with the public reaction. More than a few of our fellow citizens accept that denial of care is a capital offense, worthy of execution. Whatever you think, there is something seriously wrong with that thinking. Dare we note that it has no place in a democracy?

One understands that more than a few people want to use this event and the attendant reaction as an argument for free universal health care, of the type offered in Canada and Great Britain. The standard proposal is Medicare for All. One hastens to mention that United Healthcare is one of the leading providers of Medicare Advantage plans.

Of course, Canada routinely refuses to provide certain treatments, and seems to have promoted the fallback position of assisted suicide. It is obviously less expensive than most treatments. The same applies to the broken British system, which seems on the verge of offering assisted suicide.

Dare we say that our system is not perfect. And yet, its imperfections might have something to do with the cure, that is with Obamacare. The people who promoted Obamacare as the cure for a bad system now tell us that the system is dysfunctional.

Wall Street Journal columnist Alyssia Finley raised the Obamacare angle:

Well, well. Progressives are at last acknowledging that ObamaCare is a failure. They aren’t doing so explicitly, of course, but their social-media screeds against insurers, triggered by last week’s murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, suggest as much. “We’ve gotten to a point where healthcare is so inaccessible and unaffordable, people are justified in their frustrations,” CBS News medical contributor Céline Gounder said during a Friday segment on the roasting of health insurers.

A Gallup survey released Friday affirms the sentiment, finding that only 44% of Americans rate U.S. healthcare good or excellent, down from 62% when Democrats passed ObamaCare in 2010.

Perhaps the shooter wanted to provoke a revolution. Isn’t that what leftists do? You never know. Jia Tolentino reflects on it all for The New Yorker:

The whiff of populist anarchy in the air is salty, unprecedented, and notably across the aisle. New York Post comment sections are full of critiques of capitalism as well as self-enriching executives and politicians (like “Biden and his crime family”). On LinkedIn, where users post with their real names and employment histories, UnitedHealth Group had to turn off comments on its post about Thompson’s death—thousands of people were liking and hearting it, with a few even giving it the “clapping” reaction. 

Is the revolution at hand?

What on earth, some people must be asking, is happening to our country? Are we really so divided, so used to dehumanizing one another, that people are out here openly celebrating the cold-blooded murder of a hardworking family man?

Apparently, the answer to that question is: Yes. The indoctrination that Americans have suffered, in the school system and the media, has persuaded people that they should become part of the vanguard of the revolution. People have been taught that the system is corrupt, because it is capitalistic. They believe that only socialism will save us.

Apparently, this is what Mangione intended.

Now to be outdone, the New York Times reported on the bizarre public reaction to the assassination of Brian Thompson. Harubie Meko wrote:

Three days after a gunman assassinated a top health insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan and vanished, the unidentified suspect has, in some quarters, been venerated as something approaching a folk hero.

Could that have been his intention? Did he want to become a culture hero? Now that we know his name and have seen his face Mangione has become something of a folk hero. Armies of trolls are attacking the restaurant that turned him in. What are the chances that a unanimous jury in New York will find him guilty?

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