Tue, 08:43: For the record, finding Luigi Mangione hot has no bearing on the fact that I still think killing people, for any reason, is wrong. I have made clear over and over that I am adamantly against capital punishment.
This does not preclude me from finding poetic justice in the killing of a man at the top of the largest of many companies that have blithely let countless people die, via totally arbitrary means, in the name of profits and earnings. Brian Thompson made $10.2 million in 2023 alone. He had a net worth of around $43 million.
There's a lot of talk about billionaires these days; there are over 750 of them in the U.S. alone. The fact that $43 million is a tiny fraction of that—4.3%—does not change this conversation. Just because $43 million is chump change compared to $1 billion does not make $43 million chump change by definition. How many of you reading this have that kind of money? How many life saving procedures could that pay for?
Far more importantly, that guy's company, UnitedHealthcare, had $16 billion in profits in 2023. Who do you think that money got dispersed to? Any of the sick or disabled people whose claims they denied? Health care in this country is utterly fucked, and that's HOW IT IS DESIGNED.
Is it really a surprise to *anyone* that this is what we've come to? The lack of empathy for Brian Thompson has been the most unifying, bipartisan thing I have witnessed in ages, and it is not hard to understand why.
We can debate all we want about how much billionaires get there by exploiting others (I stand by the position that it's the only way to get there), but when it comes to people like Brian Thompson, it cannot get any more straightforward than this: they are directly profiting off the deaths of others, specifically those being denied medically necessary care. They literally structure their systems so that it happens this way. This is not a passive process.
In short, turnabout is fair play.
