There’s a lot of string to gather as prosecutors and journalists try to put together the life story of Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson in New York City this month.
Insofar as there’s an ordinary shooter profile — not sure such a profile actually exists, but I think you know what I mean — Mangione is a crazy outlier.
And I do mean crazy. The guy is clearly extremely mentally ill. What caused that condition, biological or circumstantial, we’ll likely find out.
But I would venture to say that most ghost-gunmen with a vendetta in Midtown Manhattan don’t come from vastly wealthy real-estate families in Maryland.
Not many to my knowledge were valedictorians at their fancy prep schools or hold two Ivy League degrees or were counselors at Stanford.
Most, for whatever reason, don’t come from family mansions on the fairways of a country club. The Mangiones were not just country club members — they built and own the club.
Mangione was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at Penn, and I’m sorry for trafficking in cliches, but in photos from his time there he’s the handsomest all-American frat boy there ever was – athletic, and in extremely good shape.
Except, apparently, for a very, very bad back.
And, not to be too empathetic about his alleged crime, but those of us who have struggled with lower back pain know that it can be so bad as to drive a person crazy.
And even when we seek, and sometimes get, health care for the condition, it doesn’t always work. The pain doesn’t go away. People have been known to lash out. Even, allegedly, rich people.
I understand, from following the news, that there has been an extraordinary outpouring of online vitriol directed at medical insurance and health care companies in the wake of the shooting. Except I haven’t seen that vitriol myself. I don’t much do the socials, except for looking at interesting pictures on Instagram; I read newspapers. Even there, one story I saw had 836 comments appended to it. I did not read them. But in the story I was particularly taken by an observation from a prominent New York defense attorney who says that while there is already a large body of evidence pointing to Mangione being the perp of this crime, that doesn’t necessarily mean the trial is going to be easy for prosecutors.
They will have a hard time finding jurors who do not feel they have been treated unfairly by the health care industry, Benjamin Brafman told The New York Times.
“I think most people when questioned about that issue will say, ‘Yeah, I dealt with a health care industry that I was unhappy with,’” he said.
Now, most of us just suck it up. “But they didn’t go out and execute the head of an insurance company,” Brafman added.
Still.
I know no one who believes the killing was actually justified. But I do know people who sympathize with the feelings of a young woman seen standing outside the McDonald’s where Mangione was arrested, holding a sign that said “Corrupt insurance C.E.O.s have got to go.”
This incident may in the end be merely incidental in the complicated puzzle that is getting good, affordable health care in America. But I always come back to the bottom line, one that continues to astound me: Americans pay more — far more — for our health care than anyone else in the developed world. We are at the top of the spending, and at the bottom of the successful outcomes. Plus, in no other country in the world do citizens file for bankruptcy because of the burden of healthcare costs — here, it is the most common cause cited in personal bankruptcy filings.
That’s not a sign of a healthy nation. Nor is relying for care on private insurance companies that so often turn us down. And the future of that looks even worse — one company that started to rely on AI for analyzing patient care requests reportedly denies a third of all claims.
The robots care even less for us than the bean counters do.
Perhaps it’s time for another little conversation about how we pay for health care in America.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.