Healthy countries don't have insurance assassins
Hard lessons from a tragic story
Welcome to a Tuesday edition of Progress Report.
There’s a lot to discuss tonight and I’ve recovered enough from last week’s procedure to get back in fear, so I’ll jump right to it.
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Do the right thing: Finally, after years of ragging on the guy for being spineless and actively harmful to American democracy, there is some good news to report about Dick Durbin: He may not run for re-election.
When asked whether he planned to run for another term in 2026, the 80-year-old senator from Illinois told CNN that he would announce his future plans sometime in January. It’s astounding to me that he would want to run again: between his age, disinterest in actually fighting for any set of beliefs, and the fact that Democrats are facing several cycles in the minority, there’s really no good reason for him to take up a Senate seat. Durbin himself said last month that losing the majority could impact his decision.
On the other hand, no potential primary challenger has stepped up to push him aside, and Democrats just re-elected him as their top official on the Senate Judiciary Committee. I’m willing to support and fundraise for almost any challenger, though, so spread the word over the next few weeks.
Step aside: There’s been far less deference to experience over in the House, where younger (though not always exactly young) Democrats are pushing for generational change in prominent committees — exactly what I called for last month.
Rep. Jerry Nadler (77-years-old), who has been the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee for years, announced last week that he’ll relinquish that spot to Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin (61).
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (35) is gunning to replace Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly (74) as the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee.
California Rep. Jared Huffman (60) is running to replace AZ Rep. Raúl Grijalva atop the Natural Resources Committee. Grijalva dropped out of the race and backed New Mexico Rep. Melanie Stansbury (45).
And Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig (52) wants to replace Georgia Rep. David Scott (79) atop the Agriculture Committee.
Experience is important, but the benefit of having young(er) new leaders cannot be understated. We are in a new era of political warfare, and Democrats need fresh blood with actual energy to fight these battles.
New Jersey: Two stories out of the Garden State for you tonight.
First, Gov. Phil Murphy signed a law that will severely restrict school boards from removing books from libraries (read my interview with the sponsor of this bill last year).
Second, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, one of many politicians hoping to succeed Murphy in Trenton, was caught faking his Spotify Wrapped to make it seem like he listened to a lot of Bruce Springsteen this year. Hard to think of a more inauthentic loser.
Missouri: A coalition of businesses and lobby groups has sued to invalidate a ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage and require paid sick leave that was approved by voters last month. Among other things, they claim that the initiative violates the state’s single-subject requirement. Republican officials who cleared it for the ballot disagree with the charges.
The groups suing to deny hundreds of thousands of Missourians a raise and paid sick leave include the Associated Industries of Missouri, the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Missouri Grocers Association, the Missouri Restaurant Association, and the National Federation of Independent Business.
The state Supreme Court, which will hear the case, has historically sided with liberals in the case of ballot initiatives. As a result, Republicans are also gunning to change how justices are selected.
A reaction to the system’s bloodlust, not their own
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered early last week, and now that the police have arrested the alleged shooter, the bigger picture is becoming a bit more clear.
It’s impossible for me to not filter this event through my own relevant experiences. Days away from a valve replacement when the murder occurred, I was staring down an uncertain future beyond the next heart procedure and hospital stay, wrecked already by a year stalked by death and mourning, so I couldn’t really bring myself to celebrate the death of a guy with a wife and young children. Those kids will grow up without a dad, and given all the worrying I’ve done about my toddler over the past 15 months, joining the meme parade just didn’t feel right.
At the same time, I knew that all my surgeries and hospital stays were only possible because my health insurance covered them without putting up much of a fight, an arbitrary privilege that people like Thompson dedicate their lives to denying others. Mangione was supposedly one of the tens of millions of people made to suffer excruciating pain so that American health insurers can rake in record profits, including $22 billion for UnitedHealthcare last year.
I can be sad for Brian Thompson’s family while also mourning for all the people who have suffered from the system that enriched him.
It really is that bad
Insurers’ depravity and ability to invent new ways to violate the public are without limit. I know what it’s like to live with a chronic condition and how it can send you to very dark places. In the fall of 2023, I started experiencing shortness of breath, and over the next few months, as it became harder and harder to breath, I found myself sitting at home, trying to avoid the dizziness that overtook me after walking just a few city blocks.
The feeling was immensely depressing and scary, and the same thing began to happen before last week’s procedure. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if some faceless bureaucrat with an algorithm was responsible for preventing me from getting the treatment I needed to feel better. Mangione’s pain was so immense that he withdrew from life and became radicalized by the things he read and the people he spoke with online. It does not absolve him of responsibility for his actions, if he indeed did shoot Thompson, but we should accept that much greater forces helped push him toward them.
The reason Mangione is an alleged criminal and people like Thompson are wealthy and important enough that their murders are considered assassinations is that we condemn individual crimes but consider systemic ones the cost of doing business. Insurers kill at a vast scale, through morally repulsive but legally sanctioned means. Ideally, we would end the for-profit health care system altogether, but at minimum, we desperately need new laws that ban the abusive practices intrinsic to the insurance industry. Thompson was a cog in that machine, and the tongue-in-cheek response to his murder is really about wanting to see sand thrown in its gears.
For the most part, those who are having dark fun with the killing are doing so in reaction to the system’s bloodlust, not their own. Saying that aloud doesn’t mean that I’m joining the chorus (though NYPD’s week of incompetence did make me laugh). It is possible to disapprove of what Mangione did while also acknowledging the inhumanity of the US’s broken health care system.
Unfortunately, for all the talk about needing to become more populist, some of the most prominent Democrats are instead doing the opposite by leaning into the law-and-order outrage and de facto protecting the system.
Demographics are destiny
If you were to have asked me, in the hours after the shooting, to describe the kind of person I thought was most likely to have murdered a health insurance CEO, I probably would have said an angry middle class in his 50s or 60s who had lost a loved one due to denial of care or was being crushed by medical debt.
Obviously, that answer would have been pretty wildly off, and the fact that Luigi Mangione is instead a wealthy white guy in his mid-20s with an Ivy League degree in engineering really matters.
As I spent months documenting and the election bore out, young men of all ethnicities, but especially white men, have moved away from liberalism and toward the alt-right in enormous numbers. Much of that has been a product of frustration with their own personal circumstances in a stratified economy and society that has turned on them. Mangione came from generational wealth, but the health insurance industry doesn’t care about that, and it chewed him up and spit him out, leaving him at times crippled by pain.
In his manifesto, Mangione rails against both the industry as well as the broader issue of corporate concentration:
A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed [sic] them to get away with it.
He is hardly alone among his peers in feeling this way. Polls show that young men, perhaps because they no longer feel in control of their destinies (or the beneficiaries of social structures) have developed a deep skepticism of power and those who they consider “elites.” Democrats, in their shift to neoliberalism and in pushing back against the wrecking ball that is Donald Trump, are considered defenders of the institutions that so many people loathe.
Again, there is no need to valorize Mangione or what he did, but to call the reactions “deeply disturbing,” as PA Gov. Josh Shapiro did when he condemned people who clearly are motivated by deep personal animus toward the parasitic insurance industry, is not a particularly helpful or constructive position to take.
Ironically, Mangione is a prototype of a kind of voter who Democrats want to win back. His Twitter account indicated that he was a bright, fun kid who loved to nerd out (he is a huge Pokémon fan) and had increasingly techno-libertarian leanings. His postings focused on AI and other futuristic technologies, but over time, there were more and more conspiracies, anti-woke diatribes, and right-wing influencers. His last tweet was a repost of a podcast about mental health by Andrew Huberman, the right-leaning disgraced Stanford scientist who leaned into self-help.
Luigi Mangione doesn’t have to be a hero for his actions to spur a reckoning. Nobody has to give him a medal before acknowledging the pain and suffering caused by our system and striving to truly reform it. If there’s an opportunity for something constructive to come out of this situation, morally and politically, it should be seized.
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