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This just passed across my Facebook feed: https://www.facebook.com/share/1MHqtmtrnm/
It’s a NY Post piece from a colleague of Luigi Mangione’s victim.
I opened the comments and my fears of a Bolshevik revolution are now higher. Maybe it’s algorithmic bias, but a few pages of scrolling reveals only Luigi fans, with thousands of likes on their comments.
At least the Russian peasantry had experienced setbacks under a wartime economy. But if the American people are convinced they’re being economically disenfranchised despite the numbers and all the existing redistribution, maybe they’ll stand back and let a small group topple the existing order.
People don't like Luigi because they hate Capitalism they like him because they hate health insurance companies. If he had killed the CEO of Kroger he wouldn't have the fandom he has. All you need to do to diffuse his fans and the Bernie bros for that matter is pull a Bismark and choose one of the healthcare models of any other developed country and the leftists will evaporate.
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It seems to be partly a facebook thing. The comments on the actual article are more mixed.
But it shouldn't be a surprise, it's not about socialism or redistribution. It's about health insurance and their leadership specifically. Health insurance companies are known chiefly for two things -- hiking premiums and denying claims.
I actually don't think it's even about health insurance. One thing I think is fairly consistent is that in general, people (but especially young, unestablished people) tend to believe that the elites are basically taking advantage of their situation. The disagreement tends to come in as to what the solution would be, rather than that it's happening.
Someone like Luigi is considered to be a hero because he is striking back against the corrupt rule of the elites; both left and right tend to correctly note that a lot of our so-called elites are anything but, but are somehow paid ridiculously well and given huge amounts of public respect despite their complete incompetence.
In Canada, our MPs (members of parliament) are paid approximately $200,000 a year as a baseline salary, with ministers in charge of specific roles (like minister of justice, minister of public safety) getting more, and our prime minister making around $400,000 a year. This is in addition to a really really good pension plan (so good, in fact, that it is extremely credible that our last government only survived as long as it did due to its existence; basically, we had a liberal minority, but our "labour" party voted in lockstep with them even for things like forcing unionized workers back into the office because their leader's pension vested in late December; literally the week after it vested Singh agreed to bring down the government the next time an open vote occurred). Of our MPs, we have a large number that are considered to be worse than incompetent (Bill Blair, this charming lady, our PM's former babysitter). I'm not going to go over all the horrible businesses in Canada - but needless to say, we have a lot of those too. Loblaws is fairly famous for how price-gougey it is.
People want a change from the corrupt and shitty elites who seem to destroy value rather than create, but who are constantly failing upwards.
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From a foreign perspective, it looks like the problem is less general economic disenfranchisement and more than American medical care structuring really is uniquely awful and there isn’t the state capacity to rip it out and replace it with a new kind of system (most likely the kind they have in France, Japan etc.).
I might go further and say that insurance in general is just totally broken in the West.
Firstly, the stuff that people want to insure against (big, unpredictable disasters that result in ongoing costs) aren’t what insurance companies want to cover.
Secondly, the likelihood that an insurance company will pay you depends less on the terms of your contract and more on its own PR and financials. And those financials depend on how new the company is and how its investments are going than anything to do with you and your problems. All the incentives are massively perverted - it’s a way to milk money off people to use for stock market gambling whilst paying out the minimum possible until you inevitably go bust.
Do you have examples? I have zero problems getting cover for those. The insurance companies all try to tag on useless crap I don't want, and they call to up-sell this stuff if I un-select it, but they all end up selling me insurance in the end.
I was thinking of the big change-your-life medical claims, plus some problems my friend once had with house insurance after part of the house collapsed and needed to be rebuilt. The insurance company shrugged and said 'you bought a house with a hidden structural defect decades ago, that's not our problem' and indeed that is broadly what the contract says, but the endless list of opt-outs in the contract doesn't fit with what 'insurance' is meant to be.
Hold up. Weren't they aware or should they not have been aware of the structural defect from the moment they decided to provide that insurance?
In the UK it is common for residential buildings to be >200 years old. Nobody was aware, even the surveyor didn't notice. Just one day part of the building fell down and the insurer said (paraphrased) 'okay, you had an insurance policy but it doesn't cover anything that happens because of gradual decline, or gradual damage, or structural issues, or...'. In theory they should be aware that old buildings sometimes have these issues but in practice they refuse to pay out.
It's not that I don't get where insurers are coming from on these kinds of cases, it's just that in reality they rule out basically any of the actual causes of big expensive problems which makes the policy kind of worthless. They sell the illusion of safety on their advertising materials without any actual intent to provide it. You're always taking a gamble on whether they come through for you or dig in their heels.
I agree. Isn't it the alleviation of big, unpredictable disasters that result in ongoing costs that insurance as an institution was invented to do in the first place?
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