Luigi Mangione is expected to plead guilty as early as Friday in the federal case accusing him of stalking and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a stunning development in a case that rattled business leaders while galvanizing their critics, according to a person familiar with the matter.
I really don’t understand how and why he doesn’t rather receive a huge award and a statue in his honor for having eliminated a rotten and abominable scourge and leech like that monster was and as in fact any CEO of any insurance company is, instead of prosecuting him as a criminal. Like, insurance industry is what should be illegal, he did only the correct thing.
Um, because people don’t get awards for things they didn’t do
Normal people don’t. But if you’re a billionaire who buys talent then people call you a genius who made Tesla or Amazon.
Because under neoliberal capitalism there are inherent contradictions. How it delivers “freedom” is via capital.
So there are two opposing freedoms, the freedom of a person and the freedom to grow capital.
Our system chose capital over people. So the man who exploits people’s healthcare as a business model resulting in tens of thousands of deaths each year is the hero. Because he grew so much capital.
It’s cruel how unfortunately real is this.
If the next dem président has any balls (or ovaries) at all, they’d pardon him for the federal charges as their first official act.
I’m afraid, that’s not how capitalism works.
I don’t normally address grammatical errors, but I like how this sentence works both with and without the comma.
🤣 you are right. Without comma…
It doesn’t. No punctuation would have been fine. To separate the thoughts would require a semicolon or a period. Shatner commas are illegal
Thank you for teaching me this term
Gee, could it be that murder is bad? Won’t cry any tears for this asshole getting offed, but surely you can’t believe this act contributes in any positive way to reform of the health care system? There are thousands of others ready to replace every greedy CEO. He was a symptom, not a cause.
By the way, practically every universal health care system has an insurance industry in some shape or form.
It’s not murder until there is a conviction.
UHC approved so many insurance claims after the CEO got offed that they are currently being sued by their shareholders for failing to reject enough claims and potentially hurting shareholder revenue streams.
I’d say it turned into a pretty positive act.
Killing 100s of thousands if not millions of people by denying them healthcare is infinitely worse and Brian Thompson and all these other fucks were active participants in that. They set the policy the rest of their companies follow. Murdering every single one of them is a net good for the world and is the only option left since our fucking useless politicians aren’t doing anything about it.
The health care industry (mostly) plays by the rules set by legislators. They are, in the end, responsible, and know very well how to fix the system (which would be extremely easy) but deliberately choose not to, sending hundreds of thousands to their deaths. Is that worse than murdering some asshole? Yes, absolutely, but that’s no justification. Eating a pack of razor blades is worse than eating a pile of shit, but doing neither is also an option.
Offing Thompson has achieved nothing other than improving the business of private security contractors.
There is plenty the American people could do to force legislators to do their job, but they choose not to as Americans are just rather meek and servile when it comes to their government, which is of course how its current comically corrupt and incompetent government can continue with the blessing of its people, and also why Americans would blame health care executives rather than the ones making the rules for health care executives. Maybe try organizing another light-hearted protest on a Saturday afternoon before going back to your jobs?
It didn’t accomplish nothing. It’s a documented fact that more healthcare was approved after Thompson was murdered. People are alive today as a direct result of that. It also demonstrates that these companies don’t HAVE to reject all these claims, they’re doing it because they want to.
Documented how? In the immediate aftermath of the attack, UnitedHealth explicitly stated it wouldn’t change its policies:
Sure, and poverty can be solved if rich people would just give some of their money to poor people. But we know this isn’t a solution that actually works if you want to fix poverty, you need government legislation.
Even if there was some health care insurance company that suddenly saw the light and started approving all the care people needed, it would just go bankrupt in favour of a more unscrupulous competitor - as long as the system and legislators allow it.
Except that murder is justifiable if it’s against someone that murders for pleasure and twisted benefits, like Thompson. Murdering someone with no reason or because of bad reasons is bad, and Thompson did that, so killing Thompson is good because he gave a good reason to do so. If someone’s gonna kill you, you either kill him or get killed yourself. If a genocide is going to get to the power, the only sensible thing is to kill him and all those who are with him because these people won’t understand by the words and not even by political or diplomatical means, because they won’t listen to anyone else than themselves.
I feel like you’re underestimating the number of bullets in the world.
Yes murder is bad.
It also seems like the only message the owners receive.
Always? In every case? I don’t think most people believe this. I think we have different opinions on what constitutes justified murder, but I think most of us have a line.
Which is fine, but flippantly brushing it off with this rings very hollow to me. Especially since you go on to make it sound like if it did somehow fix everything, it would be justifiable.
Why not? We can argue about the morality of terrorism, but it has definitely effected change internationally in many different political situations and cultures. Almost never is it any one act as being effective though.
I’m actually not so sure here. Is this going to be the thing that instigates reform? Probably not. Did it galvanize more people and help many realize that even many of their political opponents agree that care is in an intolerable state? I don’t know, I kind of think it did, and I think that pretty likely does positively impact the movement.
Not sure what the last non sequitur is about. We all know insurance exists internationally, but the situations aren’t at all comparable to the US.
Interesting little word, murder. Murder is bad by definition. It literally means homicide, but in a bad illegal way.
Depends on the definition used. It can be used to mean both the legal terminology, or can simply be the concept of premeditated killing of a person. I would still say a slave plotting to kill his master is definitely committing murder, even if it’s justifiable.
Regardless, in that case the comment I’m responding to is just a straight up tautology (the killing of the CEO was bad because it was a murder [unjustified killing]; this doesn’t actually argue whether there’s no justification, just defines it that way in the premise), and I’m giving the more generous reading here with room to disagree.
Fuck, the fact that this hateful, stupid, and barbaric comment sits here with 19 upvotes and zero downvotes kind of shatters my illusions about what kind of people I am interacting with here. Enough scrolling for me.
Dude you sympathise with Brian Thompson? The guy responsible for letting paying members die horrifically painful deaths for profit? Do you not see how hateful, stupid and barbaric that makes YOU? Reflect on yourself.
It’s only ok when you put a few layers of indirection between your barbaric acts and the brutal consequences of your actions. Pedo Capitalists Unite!
I don’t celebrate the murder of a United Healthcare CEO, whom by the way denied more Healthcare claims than any other insurance company in the world (by a decent margin). But I sure as hell don’t feel sorry for the guy.
His policies can be directly tied to thousands of cases where people who needed life saving treatment, died so they could save a few bucks.
But yeah, sit up on your high horse and feel superior to everybody else. You’re lucky you haven’t had to experience a health crisis that could potentially determine whether you live or die, or have a job.
IDK it sounds to me like Luigi killed one guy and saved more than one life.
Is that a bad thing now? Moral math says give Luigi a medal and a ride home.
And then close down every health insurance company as Cancer Profiteering and fund a proper national system.
a great man once said: “The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few”
that one ceo died and made so many other health insurers across the US scared that many approved claims they wouldn’t have and didn’t before saving countless lives.
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It’s pretty well documented that all insurance companies starting approving more claims almost immediately after this event.
Actually for the first month or two after the shooting, insurance companies across the board did start approving more claims. The system has resumed course since, but for a brief window, if you had medical issues you could actually have a decent chance at getting them paid for.
While you sit on your moral high ground, people like that ex-alive cunt CEO get paid to murder people.
With how aggressively they’re destroying the planet and the poor, at a certain point, putting a stop to them becomes an act of self defense.
I really wanted his defense to be that the subsequent increase in claim approvals saved enough lives that this was really more of stopping a mass shooter.
It’s a jury trial, they just have to convince 12 people it was for the greater good and this was just a trolley problem and not a revenge killing over a personal grievance.
Reminds me of defenders of Israel. Screaming anti-Semitism while these guys are committing atrocities.
I can live with a system that causes mass killings but I draw the line at killing people that enable it.
No one is saying that but Republicans and even they don’t ever admit it directly
Remind me how many democrats voted to stop Trump from bombing Iran?
If there’s one thing Republicans have taught me, it’s that I really need to give less of a fuck about other people’s problems, and spend more time gleeful at their misfortune.
So, re dead CEOs: hahahahaha
Brian Thompson, through his words and actions, caused the deaths of thousands of people
I’m not taking a stance on the moraloty of his murder, but is it even a tiny bit surprising people believe he deserved it given that fact?
Murder via a pen may generally be tolerated by society, but that isn’t universal
grammar nazi hat engaged
Murder is by definition wrongful homicide and therefore by definition immoral. I think the word you’re looking for is homicide.
How quaint of you to have the illusion of civility in this post-pandemic world. Get off your fake morale high horse and go back to watching fox
I find that there is certain naïveté on decorum obsessed centrists. Violence should be the last resort but it’s obvious when it is justified.
The lack of universal health care in the US accounts for an estimated annual death increase well north of one hundred thousand people. It’s the oligarchs who are behind that push against it.
Wake me up when you get angry at the people corrupting our democracy and maybe i’ll listen to your complaints. Until then, pardon me for supporting action against the people fucking our country.
What action are you taking about? Shooting a guy in the head? What problem does that exactly solve? He didn’t even shoot an oligarch, he shot an executive.
what the fuck do you think an oligarch is, if not the CEO of literal Bond Villain corporation that is 4th in the world in $?
Like for real. Explain yourself.
Oligarchs are persons, not corporations. An executive is an employee of a corporation. Examples for current American oligarchs include Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, not employees of the companies they own.
Nah, at the very moment that someone starts doing monstruous stuff to the innocent, they stop being persons, they lose their humanity, they become monsters, and deserve to be treated as such.
I feel the exact same way. They de-humanize themselves, we’re just calling a spade, a spade.
The board members of companies run it, and are people. The executive runs the company on behalf of the board (and sometimes are on the board). Those people absolutely can and should be held accountable.
I feel like you’re being disingenuous though, you know companies can be a part of the oligarchy too. Brian Thompson was an oligarch parasite that needed to be excised from society.
A lot more people got the healthcare they paid for, deserved, and needed. Lives were saved. That’s what it solved.
Hateful, stupid, and barbaric insurance industry
FTFY
I bet you’d love the guy who killed Hitler.
(we can smell the conservative from here)
Not only did he kill Hitler but he also invented highways. What’s not to like? /s
The guy who killed Hitler is Hitler you very dumb person.
c/whooooosh
Won’t someone think of the poor billionaire CEOs?
They can’t afford yachts if they give the people the health care they paid for.
Yeah, it’s hateful and barbaric, but not stupid, and it’s what anyone who is barbaric and hateful deserves; I believe in radical proportionality, thus what you give is what you deserve to receive back, exactly, no more and no less (if you give someone five punches in the face with a given force, you deserve exactly five punches in the face with an amount of force proportional to your resistance). You can’t expect a damn serial killer protected by millions of dollars in total assets and the title of CEO to receive flowers. And proportionally to his crime, a simple stay in jail is equivalent to giving him a bed of roses.
So, if you hate others with no reason and kill others with no reason, you deserve to be hated and killed because you’re giving reasons for that.
Saying “insurance should be illegal” is very near the top of the list of stupidest things that one can say.
You also need to work more on your radical proportionality idea.
I don’t know what you even mean by “proportional to your resistance” and how you quantify punch force and resistance, but if it’s exactly no more and no less than what you got, how is it also proportional to something else? Like I can’t eat exactly 2 pounds of ice cream, proportional to my belly circumference. It’s either one or the other.
Killing somebody is a pretty intense act, I imagine. A sane person doesn’t take another’s life in cold blood. What LM did is not a sane thing to do, regardless of what one thinks about the victim and the victims’ personal responsibility in other people’s suffering. Because it is not a sane thing to do, it’s futile debating its rationale.
I also don’t think that this murder should get special treatment on some utilitarian grounds, such as because it’s a heroic act that saved the lives of millions. I don’t think there is any concrete benefit of the murder on any specific healthcare, welfare, or health equity issue. Where are the masses who got their health back thanks to LM?
So what are you exactly celebrating? What would the statues commemorate? A poor insane man, killing a company executive, replaceable as a professional in the organization, and irreplaceable as a person in his family. Pure insanity and suffering, with no benefit, no winners. It’s a fucking sad and tragic story. It’s a powerful story undeniably, that’s why people follow it, but there is nothing to celebrate about it.
Hey you know how sometimes in society, a lunatic runs around the town square with a gun shooting all kinds of people? Dead bodies everywhere, like they’re filming Heat 2?
Then one cop steps up and fires the perfect shot, taking the bad guy down. No more victims.
The health care CEO was the lunatic shooter and Luigi was (allegedly) the cop.
You’d cheer that cop. That’s what these people are doing, like it or not, agree or not. That is what they are doing.
You should fucking learn to read. I’m not saying that insurance per se should be illegal, what I’m saying is that the industry around it should be illegal, and that’s something totally different. Insurance should exist but should be free, universal and unconditional, and, above all, public, efficient and decentralized, not a damn oligopoly that uses people’s lives as mere stepping stones to achieve more wealth.
If I punched you in the face with no reason with a force of 5 Newtons, and you could resist 10 Newtons, then you should be able to punch me in the face with 10 Newtons in return if I could resist 20 Newtons. It’s a pretty simplified example but illustrates what I mean. If I can resist the double of you and I punched you with a force equal to the half of your resistence, then you should be able to punch me with a force equal to the half of my resistence, in other words. It’s so simple that the fact that you can’t understand it says really much about you…
It’s only insane if you kill someone that never killed nobody. But that CEO killed many people. I even still think that Mangione’s act was a very soft and benevolent, I believe that said CEO deserved one of the slowest, most tortuous and painful deaths conceivable, because that is exactly how most of the people who were wrongly denied insurance died.
You’re either a bot, a shill, or amazingly stupid.
Love the user name.
In another time and place we could be friends but you have your head waaaaaaaay too far up your ass when it comes to healthcare (or lack thereof) in America.
I hope Spiny Norman eats you.
I didn’t say a word about healthcare though.
But you did when you commented about
https://scribe.disroot.org/comment/12545348
That CEO was all about shareholder value and not, ya know, helping sick people.
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