We Are ‘The Real Working Class Hero’
Why people don’t feel bad about the death of a parasitic health insurance executive.
Last week Wednesday in Manhattan, a masked gunman outside of the New York Midtown Hilton pulled out a suppressed pistol and killed Brian Thompson. After fleeing the scene, the man was at large for five days until he was caught in Altoona, Pennsylvania. The man was identified as Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old upper-class person from Baltimore. According to the note he left police and his social media history, we can infer that he was seeking vigilante justice against the healthcare industry because of a severe back injury he suffered years ago and presumably struggled to get proper treatment.
The victim of the shooting, Brian Thompson, was the CEO of the largest health insurer in the country, UnitedHealthcare. For helping the company’s stock grow 9.7% in 2023, he was awarded a massive $10.1 million pay package. As head of a firm that leeches off the suffering of people, he amassed a wealth of at least $42.9 million after being named CEO just three years ago. The UnitedHealthcare company controls approximately 15.7% of the industry, at a $562.1 billion market cap, and generated $281 billion in revenue last year. United also ranks first in claim denials, at 33%, as reported this year. In October of this year, a US Senate investigation found that health insurers like United implemented artificial intelligence to automate the claims process, coinciding with a substantial increase in claim denial. Because of this, United and other insurers are facing lawsuits over the use of this AI model, which has a 90% error rate in going against medical expert opinion.
Around eight months ago, OJ Simpson died of cancer. With such an insane year containing so many bizarre historical episodes, you may have forgotten entirely or just not known. I remember hearing about it at some point, but I can firmly say the news was completely unremarkable. It’s one of those things you remember years later and say, “Oh wait, they died?” But why did Simpson’s death carry such little burden on our lives? Because no one really feels bad. When a public person abuses his wife, murders her, is let off the hook, then writes a book boasting how he got away with it– no one has much sympathy. This applies equally to Brian Thompson. It’s just as ludicrous to mourn the death of a murderer as it is to mourn the death of a health insurance executive.
Outside of the essential cultural context in which the trial took place, the primary difference between the still people clinging to defend OJ and those who dislike him is the ignorance of how flawed the prosecution was, a relatively innocent misunderstanding. The primary difference between those defending Brian Thompson and those who feel indifferent or venerate his death is their economic class. Did all of these people suddenly become sociopaths who enjoy vigilantes killing people? Of course not. When you account for the fact that these are working-class people who the health insurance system has screwed over, it makes sense that so many could feel little sympathy for Thompson. Notice how the petty-bourgeois media has been reacting very differently. They are repulsed that so many people could be so callous toward a person being shot and killed. But these pundits are people who, for all of their adult life, never had to weigh the risk of deciding if a high deductible plan was worth having more grocery money. Notice how the wealthy capitalists and CEOs are reacting. They’re afraid. These are people who know deep down that they’ve harmed thousands, if not millions, of people to achieve their wealth and status, and they’re afraid that that harm could manifest into political resistance or even violence. These elites have good reason to be afraid; very suddenly, a mass of people realized that this isn’t left versus right and that we’re all victims of this system.
The awakening many people have experienced is a byproduct of being part of a media ecosystem that makes us think that cultural struggles are the most important. Both wings of the establishment media need this to be the case because they, while on opposite sides of the culture war, are on the same side of the class war, while we, the working class, are together on the losing end. This is why, for example, conservatives voting for billionaire-beholden Republicans always ends in betrayal, while liberals leading exclusively cultural movements always fade without making substantial change– because class isn’t part of the equation. You can notice this in headlines like the infamous “Don’t replace the culture war with class war” in the British Times paper, where the writer seems incapable of discussing politics deeper than personal identity. You see this when conservative pundit Ben Shapiro tries to spark culture war outrage over the recent killing, and his audience mass dislikes the video, leaving comments calling him a sellout. You find this in the opinion piece from New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, titled “Brian Thompson, Not Luigi Mangione, Is the Real Working-Class Hero,” where the writer obfuscates ordinary people’s anger.
Stephens makes audacious claims, painting Thompson as a person with “humble roots” while demonizing Mangione as an “angry rich kid” with a “nihilistic philosophy.” Such a nauseatingly false portrayal couldn’t be farther from reality, and people know this intuitively. Even if Mangione was an ‘angry rich kid,’ that’s an even more damning indictment of the health insurance industry if even people with privileged backgrounds feel the pain of being screwed by the system. Even if Thompson grew up ‘humble’ as can be, nothing can excuse him from exploiting, stealing, and murdering for profit the exact type of working-class people he grew up with.
Before we go any further, let’s remind ourselves how the UnitedHealthcare company and Thompson make their profit. Of all the parasitic capitalist industries, the private health insurance industry has to be the most cartoonishly evil. The business model for insurance is pretty simple. Customers pay a premium that scales with their risk level; this is their revenue. When some customers need to make a claim, they are either paid out or denied; this is their cost. For a private insurance company to exist in the first place, it must make a profit, so it must payout less than it receives in premiums on average. So, what happens when insurance companies want to increase profit? They can do a couple of things: raise premiums, which can be difficult to do with regulations, or deny more claims. There’s obviously a bit more that goes into it, like administration costs, advertising, and risk pool management, but the core profit model is the same. What happens when insurance companies deny claims? People can’t afford medical treatment, or are burdened with extreme medical debt, or both. Instinctually, most people already disdain the medical insurance system. At the least, they hate paying for it and spending time on the phone. At worst, they experience the horror of having a claim denied and fighting with the insurance company for themselves or a loved one.
Millions of people in this country are crippled by medical debt, something that is almost entirely a product of chance. Not only might you or your family be unlucky enough to get cancer, experience a paralyzing injury, or get an incurable illness, but your insurance could try to deny your coverage. This exact scenario happened with Chris McNaughton, who had developed ulcerative colitis requiring frequent treatment and $2 million in bills each year. Seven years after his diagnosis, in 2021, United dropped his coverage, stating that his care was “not medically necessary,” and billed him $807,086, leading to a lengthy lawsuit. Chris fought the appeals process and ultimately filed a lawsuit against United, which was finally settled two years later. Meanwhile, United would collect $69.65 billion in profit during 2021 and $79.61 billion in 2022. Also at this time, then-CEO David Wichmann was paid $17.9 million in 2020 and $140 million in 2021 when he retired.
Another story that was released this week was about a woman named Sharelle Menard and her son, Benji, who was diagnosed with severe autism. This year, her UnitedHealthcare coverage began denying the full hours necessary for his speech therapy. In the report by ProPublica, they obtained an internal document from United that acknowledged the company’s increasing costs from advancements in early autism screening in the past two decades. Using ambiguous corporate language, the document says that United will pursue a plan to prevent new providers from joining the network, shrink the existing network, terminate cost outliers (such as Benji), and deny access to behavioral therapy recipients.
This parasitic relationship, where insurance companies leech off of workers and then deny them care when they need it most, is a byproduct of an archaic system. A comprehensive study by Harvard and Cambridge in 2009 found that, in our privatized system where healthcare is a commodity, lack of health insurance causes 44,789 excess deaths annually. Since then, the ACA has cut the number of uninsured people by half, but 25.3 million remain uninsured. Even for those insured, on average, 17%, representing 48.3 million claims, were denied in 2021. Insurees will rarely fight claim denials, only 0.2% of denied claims are ever appealed. Despite such a small number of appeals, insurance companies still end up upholding 59% of denials.
Most developed nations on Earth have some form of single-payer or nationalized healthcare. In America’s privatized system, we only receive, on average, 68 cents for every dollar we give to health insurance. Compare this to a single-payer system where, on average, 86 cents for every dollar is spent on care. This system also means far less administrative bloat, more people are covered, no network restrictions, no wealthy elites profiting off us, far fewer denials, and less burden on hospitals and doctors. Even a pretentious center-right business professor like Scott Galloway admits change is necessary, suggesting the Medicare age be lowered every year until it covers everyone. Universal healthcare is not even just the moral belief that I and other leftists have that everyone deserves healthcare; this is equally an urgent question of economics. As our country frantically tries to keep up with China, a necessary realization is that our overall health and life expectancy are declining while spending more than ever on healthcare. This affects more than just the people’s lives immiserated by this system; it’s also the domino effect on the entire economy, which is kneecapping this country. Part of that is politics; it’s easier to rile up America’s anti-government bias than to explain that paying into a single-payer system with taxes is cheaper than paying for private insurance. The other part of that is money. Insurers lobby government officials to keep their hands off, and they listen. In 2023, Blue Cross Blue Shield spent $28 million on their lobbying budget, the largest of any insurance company across all sectors. The entire insurance industry was the third largest lobbying industry last year, totaling $157 million, behind the leader, the pharmaceutical industry, at $378 million.
The belief in the American dream is dying out quickly. Younger people are realizing that their chances even to live a modest life are becoming ever more slim as rent soars and real wages stagnate. More people are realizing that the American dream was a fundamental lie, only for the ultra-wealthy and those willing to step on the necks of others to climb the corporate ladder. As more people are paid poverty wages for back-breaking work, they are realizing that our society is not established to benefit people like them who work hard; it’s structured to benefit the wealthy. This increasing economic disillusionment within the working class explains the disconnect between those who lionize Thompson’s death and petty-bourgeois writers who don’t understand the public reaction.
As this event played out, we know for certain that we are inherently unequal. If we were murdered, there would be no manhunt, no $60,000 reward, and the story might not even get airtime. Thompson’s murder gets this attention because he is unequal to people like us in the capitalist system. The contradiction comes when someone of the working class commits a murder; it’s called ‘murder.’ When health insurance organizations are led by people who desire profit over everything else and are willing to deprive people of life-saving medical care to get it, it’s called ‘increasing shareholder value.’ That is the core concept of the term ‘social murder,’ coined by Friedrich Engels in 1845:
“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offense is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.”
In the same way that Mangione pulled the trigger on the gun that killed a man, Thompson led the company that denied the insurance claims that deprived people of necessary medical care to save their lives. The sum of all political conflicts of our time is not left versus right. It has always been this way; culture politics have been an illusion that divides us from the real struggle. The class war is the single struggle that unites all of us, and we cannot win the fight without solidarity. It has always been the rich against the poor, workers versus capitalists, elites versus commons, haves versus have-nots, aristocrats versus peasants, bourgeois versus proletariat, whatever phrase you prefer. We, the working class, are our own hero. No assassin, executive, or politician can save us— it’s up to us to organize and fight corporate power.
Pharasical nonsense. Progressives are so far removed from the working class they don’t even recognize them anymore.
God only knows we need working class heroes
https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/is-luigi-mangione-morally-superior