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GELFAND’S WORLD - On the arrest of Luigi Mangione, 26, suspected of the NYC murder of the health insurance executive:
Most of us, I would like to think, treat murder as a serious matter, the most serious of crimes and something that is beyond ordinary mercy. We have different views about how punishment should be meted out, but we view the crime as something absolute.
And now we have the New York City murder of the health insurance CEO, and things are different, it would appear, for a lot of us. The ultimate clue is that a group of online sleuths who can be counted on to help the authorities in their criminal searches have held off from volunteering their services. They are implicitly treating the shooter as some sort of hero.
I would like to think that what we are looking at is a symptom, and not some newfound, wholesale embrace of urban slaughter. But society -- and particularly those who hold the power and influence in our society -- should take note of what the symptom reflects.
There are actually two lessons to be learned here -- warnings, actually.
First, we are seeing a deep and powerful hatred of the way that our healthcare system works, in the sense that few of us are safe from what it can and will do to us financially in the event of even a modest illness. Who hasn't heard of the kinds of bills that people get from a hospital stay of only a few days? Who hasn't heard of surprise billings? And -- to be even blunter -- who hasn't had to pay thousands of dollars for even a simple diagnostic test?
And even when we are not sick, the week-to-week costs are pretty outrageous compared to what people pay in other countries.
And this list is just for people who have some sort of health insurance. There is an even nastier side to the healthcare ugliness in this country when it comes to those who do not have insurance. They get billed at many times the rate that any insurance company would pay, and the courts uphold those outrageous prices.
But the plight of the uninsured is not what is on the public mind this week. It's the crummy situation for those of us who are considered lucky because we have access to health insurance. There is a growing public sentiment that something needs doing, although there is not as yet a strong majority voice about what that might be.
A Warning to the Conservative Side of the Aisle
The other warning has to do with guns, their availability, and the pandemic nature of shootings.
We've spent the past twenty years or so bemoaning the increasing level of mass shootings. It seems to have become the standard mode of copycat behavior for the disaffected. It's no secret that it is typically a young male with access to a high-capacity firearm. And since the national policy has been to make access to such guns as easy as possible, there have been a lot of such killers.
Meanwhile, there has been a social movement to protect and expand the right to ownership of firearms which has been associated with the right wing. The standard right-wing targets -- abortion doctors and Democratic Party headquarters -- became ready targets for a few of the more extreme gun nuts.
But all of a sudden this week, the target list has expanded. And the group of people defending the right to keep and bear arms has expanded. But this time, it is in pursuit of what you might think of as a more liberal exploit.
So we come round-about to murder and finding ways to excuse it, and I find the following exchange on a site known as Quora:
The excerpt begins,
"Why aren't more people showing empathy towards the UnitedHealth CEO who was murdered? Why are people defending the suspect?"
The answer -- as published in Quora -- is the following:
"I’ll be blunt. This bastard lived like a prince on the money he made running a company that makes a practice of cheating and killing their clients. I repeat, cheating and killing their clients. They make huge profits on a business model that leans heavily upon denying their customers what the customers thought that they’d paid for. And paying through the nose at that. They have a 32% rate of denying claims. Almost one in three of their customers get cut off just when they really needed coverage. So get this. We hate them.
"The private insurance companies that insert themselves between the patients and their doctors are literally criminal conspiracies - protection rackets in which they can legally refuse to hold up their part of the bargain - with an office in each one dedicated to finding reasons to deny coverage. Every health insurance company in the US has a “death panel” that could literally tell a patient, “we’ve paid enough. Now go home and die”. This is not hyperbole. I watched them do exactly that to the guy I was sharing a hospital room with.
"They will kill you for money, and they pay enormous sums lobbying the government for the right to do that. They are evil. The US private health insurance industry must die, and this was a start."
I have purposely left off the name at the top of the comment. For one thing, I don't have any way of verifying that the chosen name of the author is legitimate, and I was more interested that Quora would publish a direct defense -- and even a celebration -- of the crime of first-degree murder. I wonder what the Quora editors were thinking.
But it is worth taking note of that comment because it represents the sentiments of thousands of other people who may not have gone to such an extreme in their way of writing, but have made the point of how badly behaved insurance companies are, and left it to the reader to read between the lines.
The conservatives -- the same ones who have been defending gun ownership and implicitly protecting random shootings -- are now in the same crosshairs. There are a lot of people and organizations who are hated in this country. Not all of them are lefties and liberals.
The Latest Trump Shenanigans
The president-elect continues to show that he is less than a mastermind. Perhaps there was some strategic aim in all those cabinet nominations -- Matt Gaetz, RFK Jr, the drunken Secretary of Defense nominee Hegseth. You know, make an outrageous nomination so that the next worst candidate will sail through. (Everybody knew of Matt Gaetz, but who ever heard of the replacement candidate?) But I don't think so. Trump looks to be following his standard procedure, which is to find somebody who is wildly conservative or wildly loyal, or in the case of RFK Jr, somebody who can be of political use. And the main observation about Trump appointees is that there never seems to be any concern for competence.
There is, however, an appreciation for the capability to do harm to the core functioning of the organization, as the proposed nominee for heading the FBI shows.
But core competency in running an enormous organization? No.
Consider one small example: The Health and Human Services department oversees a huge bureaucracy that carries out medical research in a big way. You know all those new drugs for everything from psoriasis to heart arrhythmias to breast cancer? Those treatments are the culmination of decades of research that was steered by the most competent researchers. That's why it worked and why we have those treatments.
We also have a vaccine against Covid which works pretty well. The evidence is in the death figures, which have gone down hugely. (Last week, the County of Los Angeles reported a death rate for Covid that was averaging one per day.)
So now we have a nominee to run HHS who is an out-and-out anti-vaccine spokesman. The fact that he has a few endearing qualities such as his propensity to collect parts of dead animals and drive them home (or at least to Central Park) is not the point, even though internet bloggers love to harp on the dead bear. What is directly to the point, and critically important to your grandchildren's health, is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a dunce when it comes to medical research. It doesn't seem to matter to him that vaccines against diphtheria, polio, and measles work extremely well. He will, if allowed, join with the conspiracy mongers and seriously impede useful research.
Constitutional Authority vs Fascism
Over the weekend, Trump appeared in a television interview and made a couple of inflammatory remarks. One was his vow to begin pardoning the January 6 rioters who are currently in prison. It's interesting that Trump views the whole criminal justice system as a terrible thing -- perhaps because he himself was entangled in it. He expresses nothing but sympathy for the mob which beat police officers and threatened the congress.
But the vow to pardon people is within his rights as the next president. It is, to put it bluntly, Constitutional.
But what of his remark about the House committee that investigated his actions leading up to the January 6 rioting? Trump is quoted as saying that they belong in jail. Technically, that perhaps doesn't count as a direct threat to prosecute the committee members. But it is also fascistic in content and intent. It is interesting that the Constitution itself places safeguards on the ability of members of congress to speak without fear of civil suit while participating as members of congress. The Trump comment, suggesting an even worse punishment for carrying out congressional duties, is something wildly beyond our traditions of freedom of speech.
My view? I don't think Trump is so much a 1930s fascist as that he is stupid. He doesn't know or understand what is in the Constitution, and so he guesses and flails at what his own power ought to be. He had a lot of problems in his first term because his staff would try to keep him on the legal pathways. The current approach, rather than to make sure that he stays on the straight and narrow by getting him competent staffers is to find him loyal staffers who will help him do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. That too is fascistic.
A brief comment, to be reconsidered as events dictate: The willingness of the courts to protect our system is going to turn out to be critical. A lot of people are convinced that the Supreme Court is so corrupt that it will give Trump anything he wants. Maybe so, maybe not. But on this question rests a lot of American liberty. We'll see whether the founders got it right. Meanwhile, we can hope that Adam Kinsinger got it right.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected]).
